Four Discussion Points for Easy to Slip
1. How did you structure the narrative of Easy to Slip?
a. When I sit down to write, I first ask myself the toughest question I can to help resolve the specific conflict or problem I’m facing. Trying to answer this hard question will drive the story. Each step I take unfolds organically—there’s no anticipating where the story will go. Thoughts come to me unbidden. I allow them to carry me and delve beneath the apparent reality as much as I can. In Easy to Slip, Sam wakes in a dark lecture hall in the School of International Affairs, knowing only that he’d dropped off his midterm an hour before. He’s hearing the trucks on Amsterdam Ave.
He recalls cutting his foot on a sprinkler head at age five and bashing his head on the pavement at age ten. He rides the dorm elevator to the 11th floor of John Jay Hall. He sees abusive messages written to him on the elevator walls. He walks down the hall and hears his dorm-mates putting him down. This all feels completely real. Sam perceives it to be a totally rational narrative. Yet somehow, he realizes he’s losing his mind. How will I get well? he asks. Every thought and action for the next 171 pages is Sam trying to answer that question—fighting tooth and nail to regain his apperceptive clarity, so that he can start to get well.
b. Sam’s first step is to listen to the put-downs and catcalls and try to comprehend why his dormmates are punishing him. Is it because of the girl he met the third day of Orientation and dated until mid-October? Are they envious? He reflects on his social entanglements so far that year, and at the same time, he’s seeing and hearing what’s going on around him in the present moment.Sam feels angry as hell, yet can’t feel sure that he deserves to feel angry at all. So he begins to project this anger outside of himself, on to the other people. The projection creates the aural hallucination, it drives the angry voices. And then, Sam perceives those abusive voices in present time, and again, needs to deny his perceptions and their resultant emotions. This creates more voices, a proliferation of voices, that force him, finally, to flee the dorm.
It’s almost dawn, he’s standing under the Columbia gates at 116th, and Sam sees the waitress and the cook get ready to open the Chock Full across the street. It’s like standing before an Edward Hopper, to recognize such beautiful mystery within the ordinary. Where does such recognition begin? For Sam, in Baltimore, and he stands here at 116th, transfixed by his earliest memories. And he lives with these for almost an hour. He freely experiences those memories until they’re gone. The memories bring Sam back to himself. What he remembers starts to heal him. Sam’s odyssey—observing and interrogating the life around him to understand what’s disturbing him, and then, falling back into the familiarity and comfort of memory, to regain himself and reconnect—this restorative cycling between what’s present and the past—begins on a charged and optimistic note.
It convinces Sam that if he simply keeps going, he’ll heal himself. Sam walks through the city thirty-six hours, and finally returns to his dorm room and sleeps. After much-needed rest, he comes to accept that, apparently, all is not so well. In this next section Sam engages with everyone he can, studying and trying to set up a second date with the young woman he’s fallen in love with, Michelle Markovsky. Yet he can only write two paragraphs on Faulkner for his first final exam. He’s read and studied these books all semester.
Sam can only write two paragraphs. So he returns home and has a few weeks respite with his old friends before graduation happens. And Sam has an incredibly satisfying affair that begins on the night of his Senior Prom. Being connected, knowing love again, allows Sam to let down his defenses and he can admit to himself that he’s going crazy. This is the point in the book where Sam turns a corner. Experiencing love these few days allows him to confront his own denial. Yet in freeing himself from denial, Sam necessarily accepts an internal lability that allows for further decompensation.
The final third tracks the latter stage of Sam’s psychological descent and his subsequent journey to health in close detail. Does he answer the initial question, If you find yourself losing your mind, how do you get well? I’ll never know. Perhaps the reader will. Yet, if I ever feel I can answer the tough question that initiates any narrative I write, then I make sure I go back and restructure my question. I don’t ever want to fully answer that initial question. I want the reader to keep pondering, to try to come up with his or her own answer. That payoff—the freedom to come to understand more about him or herself—belongs to the reader, who is free to react and feel and receive whatever thoughts they may regarding the characters and the events in my story.
2. What is coming-of-age? How does this process unfold for Sam?
In fits and starts, with moments of frustration and fear. Lots of second-guessing and self-doubt. Sam grows up in an era when kids are free to wander and have parties and make whatever choices they want. That freedom encouraged self-exploration, it exercised every young person’s imagination. Kids believed they could do anything. If they felt pressure, it was that peer expectation to rebel, to ignore or disregard boundaries. Violating boundaries caused problems foryoung people, and older people as well. Easy to Slip documents a more profound dissociative process. The aggressions Sam witnesses or feels subjected to, breed the kind of reflexive mistrust no kid should ever feel, so early in life.
Everyone experiences coming-of-age differently, yet the capacity to engage fully with others is something we hope we’ll all share in adulthood. Sex is the easy part of intimacy. It’s the possibility of emotional openness—helping another person to feel valued and safe—that eludes people, kids especially. It’s easier for Sam to feel desirous and express these basic needs with women. What hurts Sam most is the lack of intimacy he experiences in his relationships with men. He’s surrounded by boorish, competitive stoners in the dorm, he perceives his father as emotionally distant and relentlessly critical, and when he talks with his uncle, Sam never quite gets the response he’d like. In the final third of the book, a psychiatric aide named Evan offers the kind of unconditional acceptance Sam’s been seeking ever since he became a teenager. This allows him to let go of some elaborate and carefully constructed defenses—the psychological fortress of schizophrenia—and begin to deal with some unspeakably painful guilt. Sam has diversified his investments in denial, and he’s invested widely. He’s literally given up his life to successfully accomplish this categorical denial. Evan is the surrogate family member that destabilizes the defense mechanisms and moves the therapy along. He gives Sam the sense of agency and emotional security needed to confront rooted and long-buried trauma.
Everyone values different things as they come of age, yet what differentiates kids who’ve achieved a measure of maturity and a bit of independence is that sense of feeling at ease, of being valued, and of knowing one’s capacity to provide that reciprocity and safety to others.
3. Psychiatry and Analysis
Yes, to both. A categorical imperative, Easy to Slip seems to say. Sam fights to get well at the very onset of illness—page one, chapter one. Yet it isn’t until he arrives at Chestnut Lodge that a verifiable, clinical process of recovery begins. Indeed, a few of the more gifted, sensitive psychiatrists and psychiatric aides at the Lodge helped to structure my treatment. They pushed me to confront the causes and underpinnings of my specific illness.
Psychodynamic therapy necessarily involves interplay between patient and therapist. It is active, with the therapist pushing the patient forward into greater self-awareness and a heightened transference vis-a-vis the therapist. Effective therapy is a highly scientific process. When symptoms intrude or disable a patient, a helpful psychodynamic approach involves the use ofcold-wet-sheet packs and psychotropic medication. When symptoms lessen, and the patient feelsready, the psychodynamic approach encourages a gradual diminution of dosage with the goal of freeing the patient from dependence on psychotropic and lesser forms of medication entirely. The initial dosing might be viewed as an essential vaccine against any intrusive or deterioratingsymptoms.
It is a most helpful means to a medication-free end. Harry Stack Sullivan was a gay psychoanalyst whose groundbreaking work, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, provided the theoretical bases and underpinnings for the wonderfully comprehensive and inclusive process of psychodynamic therapy. Whereas Freud posited that the psyche was formed in the first 1-6 years of an individual’s life, and that effective therapy for illnesses involved undoing or adjusting the events of early childhood, Sullivan proposed thatearly development depended upon the interaction of an individual’s genetic inheritance with the specific conditions and events he or she faced through infancy and childhood. Sullivan positedthat enormous variation and difference exists in human beings, both physiologically and psychologically.
The sheer variety present suggests that all human beings, in their earliest development, possess the capacity to experience happiness, to work and create in a productive manner, to give of themselves and to be generative in relation to others, and, finally, to instinctively repair themselves when faced with accident or injury. According to Sullivan, mental disorders stemmed from the repression of the individual’s conscious needs and desires, and the denial of their present awareness and most immediate aspirations. Those who suffered illnesses might recover or discover health and productivity through learning to accept their essential personality, whatever that might be, and make whatever adjustments were needed to fully engage with others and contribute to the human community.
Harry Stack Sullivan viewed war as the ultimate mental illness. Sullivan also posited that the free, unfettered experience of sexuality took up a small percentage of an individual’s time. He therefore suggested that whatever sexual needs or desires an individual experiences should be honored fully and encouraged, so as not to unnecessarily burden the individual’s awareness. Dr. Sullivan was responsible for exempting approximately 1.5 million American gay men from military service during WWII, granting them 4F exemptions to spare them the harassment and abuse they would likely have been subjected to in the United States Armed Forces of that era.
Yet it was Dr. Sullivan’s development of psychodynamic therapy and his work with severely disturbed patients that constitutes his core, invaluable contribution to modern psychiatry. Freida Fromm-Reichmann was perhaps the most visibly influential and effective psychiatrist and analyst of the last century. Fleeing the Holocaust, she brought core ideas she began to formulate while practicing medicine in Europe to the continental United States. Fromm-Reichmann believed that by saving one life, the physician, day by day, might save the world. She posited that loneliness and isolation were root causes for the severest illnesses. Through existing, side by side, day after day, with the most severely dissociated individuals, the doctor could establish the crucial emotional bond that might provide the means for recovery.
Throughout her career, Fromm-Reichmann succeeded in healing countless patients presumed to be beyond cure. In thedepth and brilliance of her clinical work, she closely resembles the neurologist Oliver Sachs, whose work formed the basis for his groundbreaking book and Penny Marshall’s extraordinary film adaptation, Awakenings. Frieda Fromm-Reichman worked with Joanne Greenberg, who later wrote I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, an account in novel form, of her therapy and eventual recovery at Chestnut Lodge.
4. Creating A Historical Context in Easy to Slip
My mother saved almost all my papers, letters, objects, photos, and paintings from all the years I was growing up. I received the pleasure and immeasurable benefit of studying thisdocumentary evidence my mother had so thoughtfully and carefully archived. I read the NY Times on the Times Machine site, which presents each individual issue of thenewspaper in its exact and precise original form. I closely read each and every newspaper issue for every specific day that I write about in Easy to Slip.
I immersed myself in the extraordinary literature that was being published in the 1960’s and inthe 1970’s in America, focusing on books published from 1977-1981, when I was an inpatient at Chestnut Lodge and read newspapers and contemporary fiction with a sometimes inattentive, yet frequently insatiable curiosity. This means of sublimating a growing, healthy sex drive introduced me to the thrills and comforts of narrative fiction. I’ve been an obsessional bookworm ever since.
Favorite books that I read at least once during this charmed period, 1977-1981:
John Cheever’s Collected Stories (released in 1977) and Bullet Park (1969)
V.S. Naipaul’s Guerillas (1975)
John Fowles’s The Magus (revised edition released in 1977)
Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978)
William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice (1979)