Corpsing
Corpsing by Sophie White is one of our nonfiction recommendations for April. Corpsing is Sophie White’s fourth book and is published by Tramp Press, an independent publisher based in Dublin. Sophie White hosts a podcast called The Creep Dive and her previous books are Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown (Gill 2016), Filter This (Hatchette 2019), and Unfiltered (Hatchette 2020).
You know the score if you have read our other reviews: when writing about a book I think it is helpful to include the blurb as this is what folks might first read if they picked up this book in a bookshop or in your local library. Maybe someday I will explain why I think this is so important. Mostly it is because I have been burned by the difference between how a publisher describes a book and how a reader describes a book. Anyway, we are told of Corpsing:
In this vivid ambitious essay collection, Sophie White is a uniquely articulate witness to the horrors of grief, addiction, mental illness, and the casual and sometimes hilarious cruelty of life.
The title of the book, Corpsing, refers to a theatre term for when someone breaks character on stage. White equates this to the times when her efforts to hide her grief, mental illness, and addiction fail. She gives the example of trying to hide her drinking during a playdate with another parent, obsessing over how quickly she was drinking in comparison to the other mom.
I’ve seen a lot of reviews describe this book as raw and visceral and I would agree. The big themes of this book are grief, addiction, mental illness, and motherhood. White dives into some complex topics with a brutal honesty that at times made it difficult to read, but her message is urgent and I think many people will see some of their own challenges in her narrative.
White opens the book with a series of essays about the death of her father. The parallels between my own experience and White’s were surprising, because my father passed within the same year as White’s father and also had Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s takes away the core of a person. It takes their memories and their personality, and for the family, it is a long and painful goodbye to someone who looks so familiar but who isn’t inside that body anymore. White writes, “That’s what happens with illness: it obscures the person, my dad, your child, our friends until even when we are holding their hands and bearing witness to them day after day, you can no longer see any of the person they were.” Her experience of grief was also so relatable. After all the time we had to say goodbye there is always something else we wish we could have done. For White it was taking photos; for me, it was talking on the phone more. This section of the book is refreshing in its honesty about how grief shows up in day-to-day life.
I really enjoyed the way that White writes about the pressure women feel to look and present themselves as thin,happy and successful at all times. In one essay she talks about how the recent rebranding of the weight loss industry has changed the way we think about our bodies. Instead of praising skinny bodies, we praise “strong” bodies. Instead of admitting to selling a diet, many companies now state they are in the business of empowerment. Despite the change in marketing, the real message is still the same: our bodies are wrong and we should be working toward making them good and thin. But it is no longer acceptable or feminist to claim to be dieting or to admit that we don’t love our bodies or feel neutral about them. About not eating sugar, White says, “I’m claiming to be feeling amazing, pretending it is nothing whatsoever about how I look.” I feel like this sentence could have come from my journal. I have been open in the past about my struggles with my weight, food, and disordered eating, and I found White’s writing on the topic to be relatable and on-point. The admission to being consumed with how she looks while knowing that the diet industry is bogus and harmful is a much-needed message and reflects how I and many others feel. I know that the media and the diet industry make billions selling me the message that my bigger body is bad. I know deeply that this is wrong and that all bodies are good bodies. And I have days where I wanted my body to look different, specifically smaller, and it consumes every part of thatday. The association of fatness with badness is still thriving in our culture, and we need a more holistic understanding that aligns more with body neutrality.
I appreciate the honesty and vulnerability White displays when talking about her experience of motherhood. She writes about raising children, “No, it’s not just you. It’s not just me. We are all exhausted; we are all shaken; we are clueless. We’re not monstrous. We all love them but fuck me, it’s hard sometimes. And it is so much harder when nobody seems to be saying it.” I wish I had these words when I was a young single mother trying to balance work with raising a newborn. There is so much pressure out there to be an Instagrammable mom who is able to make homemade healthy meals each night and have a perfectly minimal and clean home and kids who sit still and look cute in designer baby clothes. This is all on top of the pressure felt to protect our children and prepare them to survive an increasingly unsurvivable world. White’s voice counters this narrative and makes space for those of us who are winging it and scraping by. If you have someone in your life who is on the road to parenting, I think they would really appreciate this book.
Finally, I am a true crime lover. If you ask my partner and daughter, they will say that I spend a lot of time watching “murders.” White suggests that women love these sordid true crime stories because it is the one genre where women are usually protagonists. She also writes that maybe because women are so often the victims of crime, we like true crime because it gives us more tools for how to survive. I am not into horror films or even thrillers — I am the first to admit that I’m too much of a wimp to consume those, but for some reason, I separate true crime from this and it doesn’t scare me as much as it fascinates me that the monsters are real. Throughout the book, White shares her fascination with all things weird and horrible in a way that felt really relatable.
This was a great read and there are so many more areas I could have touched on, but we would be here all day. This book would be a great read for someone dealing with grief and addiction, mental illness, and parenting. The writing is accessible and there is lots of humor mixed in among more serious topics. If you pick this up, I would love to hear what you think!
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