Today, Our Hell Is Sunny

Abstract

My manuscript invokes fairytales and myths in order to complement and make greater meaning of the traumas, both personal and familial, in the nonfiction portions of the essays. Each essay is braided or segmented, and while most essays feature a memoir portion interwoven with a retelling of myth or fairytale, two pieces (“My Guardian Banshee” and Looking at the Face, It’s Not For Us,”), utilize mythological characters (a banshee in the first, and the Grecian Cassiopeia in the second), in order to play with the idea of reality vs. fiction in light of the psychosis I was experiencing in both of the essays. In “Blood and Poetry on the Battlefield,” I also manipulate the concept of reality by using Irish war goddess mythology, specifically the crow, who talks to me within the essay. The other essays heavily focus on the aspect of physical appearance—for instance, “Bad Medicine” uses the Circe myth in The Odyssey to explore the physical nature of side effects of psychiatric medication; “I Abandon My Echo” uses the Hera and Echo myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses to highlight how my father’s predatory gazing caused me to develop a speech impediment; “The Image of a Daughter’s Wasted Body” pairs the narrative of my sister’s anorexia with a tale from the Arabian Nights in which a bride refuses to eat; and “Today, Our Hell Is Sunny” traces my maternal grandmother’s modeling career and my mother’s struggle with PCOS to my current relationship with my mother. It invokes the Persephone myth to explore the idea of hyper-focusing on appearance as a kind of Hell. Throughout the essay collection, there is the arc of my mother’s personal growth, as well as the arc of my relationship with her. In “I Abandon My Echo,” she appears as an antagonist; however we learn about her abusive upbringing in “How to Get Rid of an Unwanted Child,”—which invokes changeling mythology—and we see her nurturing side in “The Image of a Daughter’s Wasted Body.” Ultimately, we end on “Today, Our Hell Is Sunny,” and in the final scene of that essay my mother and I let go of the past and enjoy delicious ice cream together (amidst the spring growth representative of Demeter).