I‘Creating a sandwich: soft white roll, roasted chicken, sharp cheese. A bright little slice of tomato. After finishing this review I will go to the supermarket and buy a Hot Cook for myself. sink my teeth into
This was not my idea. I caught Laura McPhee-Brown’s Wry Doll Lust. One of his characters craves the same sandwich, made like this: “He needs a particular amount of cheese and chicken to give him the feeling he needs while chewing and swallowing.” I know that feeling. There’s nothing cheap about cheap pleasures. And the worry doll understands joy.
McPhee-Brown’s third novel is the story of an affair told from both sides: two women – Heloise and Lacey – strangers on a train who become entangled in something cruel and all-consuming. Their accounts are next to each other, as intimate and separate as twin hotel beds. We often get to play detective in books like this, lulled into believing that we can see further and further than any lover (think Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies). They tempt us to believe that the truth is knowable and that blame can be apportioned – that the beds can be pushed back together.
Not here. We will always know less than the characters, we will never have the information we need. The Worry Doll tells us to make decisions anyway, knowing that our evidence is shoddy and our hearts are fickle. This is a novel for readers who like the interpretive gameplay of books like Audition by Katie Kitamura and Asymmetry by Lisa Holliday. Happiness is speculation.
McPhee-Brown is interested in how desires make us honest liars: how two people can go through the same encounter and remember it completely differently. Very cruelly. Dangerously so.
We first meet Heloise. It’s been eight years since her relationship with Ernie and a few months into her affair with the decidedly carefree Lacey – an alienated Gen Z. Heloise is in her 30s and her life seems to be set in stone: meaningful work, a “charming little house”, dinner-party friends, a charming little cat, herbs in pots. And sweet, innocent Ernie. But press any of it and it gives. She is replaceable at work; Ernie’s people own the apartment; Even the Pearl cat needs fancy prescription food. And did Heloise actually choose any of this?
We see her pouring herself into elaborate messages and declarations, and Lacey answers in pieces: “It’s their pattern – Heloise gives everything to Lacey, Lacey gives some to Heloise; she takes it, as if it’s enough. Before she can stop herself, she sends back to Lacey all her love, all the swelling inside her”.
Lacey feels like a grenade and Heloise has her teeth clenched around the pin. But the opposite can also happen. Who has the power here? What even counts as power? To want or to be wanted? Lacey is full of youth and energy. But Heloise has disposable income and the power of perspective: everything we know about Lacey is filtered through her. We would not meet the young woman until years later, when these feverish days would become a thing of memory.
For now, the only thing we know for sure is the strength of Heloise’s will. The way it resides in his body. This is why the language of lust is linked to the language of fever. This is nonsense. consumption. Boiling and rotting. Heloise started losing things: a credit card, her handbag, groceries. Is this the beginning of something sinister, or is he simply being tamed? How does it matter?
I have a low tolerance for twee and Precious Heloise tests my limits. his expansive self-pity; Her detailed self-care. His own cut tresses. The way she names swans on her bathroom tiles: “Philomena, Featherpuss, Gwenny.” Thank God for the rapacious Lacey, who takes over the novel halfway through and overturns everything we think we know. Goodbye Lavender Soap; Hello physical mess.
These pieces exist for a psychological sexual cat-and-mouse game. But who is the mouse? (“She wonders if she’s a sociopath,” Heloise asks herself, “if Lacey is one too.”)
Worry Doll is balanced on that pressing seam where queer meets sensual. This is a novel of the body and its threshold. The body that leaks, expels, hungers, hurts, stinks and cramps. The body which rots. McPhee-Brown refused to eat clean food and have sex, away from urine and menstrual blood. The mouth is for kissing, but also for chewing, vomiting, and drinking. We lick lovers. We lick plates. We gnaw bones. We resort to alternatives. She grants equal (equal) dignity to everything; Same sexy weight.
But for all its danger and mess, Worry Doll is a novel about the ordinary business of having a body. Sometimes the most disturbing horrors are the ones we invent to make our passion – our hunger – feel reciprocated.
Desire grips Heloise in her body, and it is impossible to read this book without becoming aware of herself and what she wants. Between the mental workload of the day and chronic pain, I often forget about myself, or try to. I think of it like a transportation system for my brain. The Worry Doll returned me to its flesh – purr and lurch. I read the book one insomniac night and in the morning I woke up hungry.
