Invisible Wounds- An Interview with Juliet Escoria
Any time I think about the late 90’s I feel like I’m stepping into a time machine that is bringing me back to Hell.
Juliet Escoria’s debut novel Juliet the Maniac takes place in 1997. That’s the year I graduated from high school. That’s when the façade began to crumble — I was barely 19 and too exhausted to go on pretending like I was fine when I clearly was anything but. I didn’t know yet that I had depression, I didn’t know that I hated myself, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I definitely didn’t know how to change the way I felt— unless I got wasted. Alcohol was the solution that made it possible for me to anesthetize the magnitude of my mind
This novel gives brutal insight into the abyss that surrounds the mind of a teenage girl who is battling mental illness, addiction, and repeated attempts of suicide. Gleaming with Escoria’s self-awareness and profound honesty, Juliet the Maniac feels like the diary my teenage self was too afraid to write.
Juliet and I conducted this interview over email.
Q: I googled the definition of ‘maniac.’ It’s a word I’ve known since I was 5 years old and obsessed with the dance sequence to the song ‘Maniac’ in Flashdance and I’ve never quite considered what is means, specifically. The first definition I saw said ‘a person exhibiting wild behavior, usually violent and dangerous.’ What a perfect word for that indefinable, out of control, scary feeling. In my past experience it wasn’t even a feeling really, feelings pass— it was a constant a state of mind. Being angry, confused, scared and no longer caring about anything. How’d you come to choose that word for the title? It’s perfect and definitely underused, in my opinion.
A: I don’t entirely remember. I had a list of potential titles in my phone and this was one of them. I’ve always felt an ownership over words that relate to “crazy”; at times, I have literally been a maniac and literally been crazy. Most people can’t say that about themselves, so high five on being in the maniac club.
A few years ago, I was in a mental hospital, and I called myself “crazy” in group. The counselor didn’t want me to say that about myself, because she saw it as a pejorative term. But, I felt like, right now I am crazy—I am fucking hallucinating and I can’t stop talking and I can’t sleep or eat. I guess I could have said “I am currently chemically unstable” or “I am suffering from an acute mental illness” but “crazy” sounds better, and, in my opinion, is a more accurate way of conveying what it’s like to be full-blown manic. Without psych meds and a lot of upkeep, I’m a crazy maniac. It’s a fact!
I do remember this part of coming up with the name: I was in New York at the same time as Chloe Caldwell and Chelsea Martin. We went out to eat pizza, and I shared the list of potential titles with them. This was the one they both liked best.
Q: Juliet the Maniac is told from the point of view of a grown woman looking back on the darkest times of her adolescence, and it’s apparent throughout the book the narrator is looking at her past through a lens of understanding that her teenage self couldn’t have had yet. What catharsis was achieved for you during the writing process of this novel? My assumption is that you reconciled— on some level— a great deal of your childhood before you started the novel (am I correct?) but I’m wondering if writing this book surprised you in any way by releasing emotions you weren’t aware of.
A. I was surprised by how many goddamn emotions I have about this part of my life. Like Juliet (my real name is Julia, so I think of the character in the book as Juliet), I’ve been through a ton of therapy and done a lot of other work on myself, and I felt like I’d parsed through most of it. But while writing this book, I realized I hadn’t reconciled this particular part of myself at all. I had such raw emotions about it, still, which is frustrating. I ended up going back to therapy for a bit, just to address this time in my life, because I realized I’d never actually talked about it in depth as an adult. In therapy, I realized I had absolutely no compassion for myself at this age, which is weird, especially because I have learned to have compassion for myself in general. I love therapy; I only went for a few months and it really helped.
I think it will take at least a few more months before I could give you a definitive answer about catharsis. With my other books, something happened upon publication, where the things that I had written about no longer felt as shameful or troublesome. I think it has something to do with taking your obsessions and failures and shame and guilt and turning them into a pretty object.
Q: In the novel when Juliet is listening to a girlfriend describe her experience with being bipolar, you write, “I was shocked…. hearing… my experiences come out of someone else’s mouth.” Last February I attended a reading where you read sections from Juliet the Maniac. The scenes you read took place in the hospital after Juliet had her first suicide attempt, and she was processing the aftermath and what she had just put herself, as well as her parents, through. I’d never heard anyone describe a scene before that was so precise with my own experiences with depression, wanting to give up and end my life, and also witnessing the heartbreak I caused my parents when they had to face these facts about me. Can you tell me a little about your own experience with the friendships and relationships you’ve had where a bond forms through the mutual sharing of secrets and pain?
A. That’s one of the great things about 12-step groups. There is an emphasis on making friendships with your same gender, that are based on human emotion and experience, rather than superficial interests like getting fucked up. It’s an important component of recovery, and, I think, of being someone who enjoys and feels connected to life.
One thing I’ve been lucky with is being able to find and maintain friendships with other women. When I was younger, these friendships resembled serial monogamy, where one person would be my world and then suddenly we’d “break up” for whatever reason, and they’d be replaced by someone else. I’ve seen a lot of books that got the weirdness of teen girl friendships right, but never one that got the interchangeability, and I wanted this book to have that. I’m guessing that this experience is fairly common, and that a huge chunk of teenage girls could be (incorrectly) diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. As I got older – like Juliet, this began at the continuation school I went to – the relationships grew more nuanced. Still, it took me a while to have consistent, emotionally open friendships.
When I was using, I had a core group of girlfriends. Usually when a person gets sober, they lose most of their old friends because it turns out they were more using partners than friends. But this group of women stayed my friends; I’m still incredibly close with them. We have a lot of diverging interests, but one thing we have in common is that we’re all neurotic, and we share our neuroses with each other. I think honesty begets honesty, so if you want more emotional connection, then the first step is being honest with other people about your shit. Not everyone has experienced the level of crazy that Juliet or myself have experienced, but everyone has insecurities and anxieties.
Q: There’s a scene where Juliet and her friends dumpster dive and find clothes, a purse, shoes and a wallet with id for a woman in Arizona. They also discover what appears to be blood, but they don’t think too much about it, or do anything besides take the stuff they want from the garbage. You write of the fur jacket found in the dumpster, “…I got it from a dead woman. I tried to feel bad about it, but it never worked out. I really loved that coat.” I can recall so many things I did before I sought treatment for my eating disorder and other addictions, lies I told, things I took that didn’t belong to me, people I hurt— I remember knowing I should feel badly, but I never did. Maybe it was a self-protection mechanism, I was already so screwed up I don’t know if I could have handled being accountability for all the destruction I was causing. You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you no longer drink or do drugs. Would you mind sharing your experience with what’s described in the rooms of recovery as “getting your feelings back” and how did accessing those feelings guide the writing of this novel?
A. Early on in sobriety, I had all these emotions but they didn’t feel connected to anything. Mostly I felt rage; anger felt safer to me than anything else. A few months into sobriety, I started to feel sadness. I would purposely read and watch things that were sappy and sad so I could cry over them, because I didn’t yet know how to cry and feel sad over the things I actually was sad about.
I also remember doing the 5th step, the one where you share your 4th step with your sponsor (the 4th step is where you “take a searching and fearless moral inventory”). It was the middle of winter, the first year I was living in New York. I remember walking home and the sun was starting to set, the sky was bright orange, and the air was so clean and crisp feeling and I felt this weird lightness in my chest that I didn’t understand. It took me a while to register that this feeling was happiness. Of course, I’d had a lot of fun as an addict, and had fun while manic. And there were certain things that I felt happy about, but I hadn’t felt happiness as like, a state of being, since I was a child. I wanted to replicate this in the book – the thawing and the fact that it took a while to identify positive emotions because they’re so foreign – so Juliet has a moment of this when she’s at a 12-step meeting.
Q: This novel is written in the honest and disaffected voice of a teenage girl. There is a strong emphasis on physical appearance throughout this book. Most characters are described physically in terms of their bodies, overweight characters get called fat, Juliet and her friends are the pretty, cool girls. Juliet mentions when someone dresses in a way that’s unaesthetically pleasing to her— she was surprised that she was attracted to a guy who wore Tevas, not that I blame her at all. It’s all very specific and adolescent sounding, as it should. How natural was it for you to think back to this time and convey the thought patterns and mannerisms of a teenage girl on the page?
A. This was one of the things that made my experiences with the onset of my bipolar disorder so distressing to me. I was very concerned with appearances and being “perfect” and “cool,” and mental illness is so imperfect and not cool. I put a lot of time and thought into superficialities and worrying about what people thought of me. Surprise, this leads to misery!
It’s still something I can fall into. I feel like I have a lot of people living inside of me, and one of them is a teenage Mean Girl. Sometimes I catch myself dismissing somebody because I don’t like the way they dress, or think they’re boring or whatever. It’s really shitty of me and it feels bad, but at least I’m aware of it now and can snap myself out of it. So, unfortunately it wasn’t much of a stretch.
Even now, my default mode is setting unreasonable expectations for myself, in terms of everything from work to my appearance. It’s an annoying thing that I have to continually work on—reminding myself that it is not possible to be perfect in all things, all the time, and especially so for someone whose mental state is technically precarious. My husband calls it “A-student brain.”
Q: I love your poetry. You have a poem in the Triangle House Review Anthology Through Clenched Teeth called Paragaurd. The last stanza gave me chills, it says:
The IUD will stay for ten years
A length of time I cannot fathom
Because the person I occupied
A decade ago
Is someone I do not know
Someone I cannot understand
Someone who now makes me
Sick
I love how bizarre it is when someone is the universe in your life and then years later nothing but indifference is felt for them. I think I chose to love it because I don’t want to be sad about it. I couldn’t write a poem to save my life. How do you decide what gets expressed through poetry, and what turns into fiction?
A. It’s something that’s pretty intuitive, in that I don’t give it too much thought. My approach to fiction is very much about storytelling—what are the stories that I tell myself about myself? What are the stories I tell people in my life about me? With poetry, it’s more about wanting to convey a feeling rather than something that has characters or plot.
Q: In the section of the book called Letter From The Future #1 when describing the act of forgiveness, you write, “Do you think forgiveness can be granted by a passive act from a stranger? Does it work like that? And if it doesn’t do you know what does? I’ve only been trying to find an answer to this question for half my life.” I wonder what your thoughts on “forgiving oneself.” My gut reaction to that term is that it sounds too much like a phrase you’d see on thrown around in parts of the internet that try to commodify self-care, and I cringe. But beyond that reaction, it’s something I also needed to do in my own recovery and it really helped. I didn’t know I needed to try self-forgiveness until it was pointed out to me. I’m just trying to pass it along to you, since writing “And if it doesn’t do you know what does?” sounded quite earnest.
A. I wanted this book to be as real as possible while being a fiction, like truth buried by fiction buried by truth buried by fiction and so on, like a Xerox of a collage. While writing this book, I realized I didn’t understand myself, which seems inherently contradictory and therefore something that would be interesting to write about, so I wanted this confusion to be replicated in the book.
I never got to have the traditional high school experience, or the traditional college experience, and it made me feel like I’d missed out and fucked up. However, I got to experience a lot of things that most people don’t get to, or don’t get to until much later in their lives, so it was a trade-off. Yes, I never got to attend graduation, or go to prom, or live in a dorm, etc., but I had real genuine life experience at a young age, and I got to feel things through my mania that most people only get to experience through hallucinogens, and so on. Besides that, I was very sick. Being “normal” was literally impossible.
While I was able to forgive myself for the things I did in my addiction toward the latter days of my using, I couldn’t get my emotions about my teenage self to match up with my intellect. I also felt stupid for caring about this at all. Like really, does it matter that I never completed high school? Or that I never got to live in a dorm? But we’re human, and we feel emotions, and these emotions are often illogical and objectively silly. Still, we feel them, so it’s equally silly to judge them. I’m allowed to feel sad that I was too consumed with my addiction & mental illness to go to prom.
It really helped me to frame these feelings as a type of grieving. With grief, the pain doesn’t go away, but we can learn to accept it. By calling it forgiveness, I think I had the expectation that the pain would heal itself, which hasn’t been my experience. I will always have a sort of wound there, and that’s OK.
Lauren Grabowski is an essayist and fiction writer living in New Jersey. She is a fiction editor at Hobart.
