Literally Show Me a Healthy Person

This is like one of those trainwrecks that you can’t look away from, OK, except it’s the written presence of a young woman whose intimate, drug-riddled, cum-stained, fragmented-text story is as deftly captured as it is harrowing.

literally show me a healthy person, relentlessly aswarm with both insights and idiocies, is also, at times, hilarious. Or at least it’s hard not to laugh out loud at certain points where author Darcie Wilder is trying to be funny – because she can be extremely fucking funny – or where your empathy is so painfully wracked that laughing is all you can do in response instead of screaming.

It’s good to be able to read this thing with my own early twenties three decades behind me, tell you what, otherwise the immediacy of emotional and experiential resonance might’ve broken a few major bones, and then I’d be wanting to sue Tyrant Books for disseminating this level of weaponized expression among the general populace. Which would be a sad thing, ultimately, because even though I’d surely lose that lawsuit, I understand that such litigation can have a chilling effect on publishers, and I – and you – all of us – we definitely want this Tyrant Books to keep on releasing new material.

I mean, check out their catalog, the things they’ve done so far besides publishing NY Tyrant magazine. It’s like they’re out there with the tastiest blood and guts, chumming the sea of letters to – ah, hell, I don’t know, something about sharks, right? Something about when you see Jaws for the first time and you’re like, whoa, fuck, I’m never going near an ocean again. But then you also wind up really liking Richard Dreyfuss’s character and understanding that sharks are always hungry for whatever’s vital and bleeding when it’s tossed over the side of a boat, right?

It’s a risky bet to judge books by their covers – Calvin Gimpelevich’s Invasions from Instar Books has a downright shitty cover, for instance, yet it’s one of the best new collections of stories available – but just from the well-designed looks of what this Tyrant is hawking, and extrapolating from the contents of Wilder’s confessional pages, here’s where you want to be spending a lot of your reading time and money.

Shall I leave you to it, then, while I go and attend to a bit of neglected self-care? Done.