Of Monsters and Motherhood

Amongst humanities graduate students, especially literature students, there is a joke that grad school will kill one’s passion for reading. I always thought that I would be impervious to such a curse – that no matter what my Hispanic Literature programs threw at me, my love of reading would remain unscathed. I chose to study literature because, like most people who do the same, I loved reading from an early age. Further, I loved dissecting passages and plots, analyzing character motivations, and connecting works of fiction to larger societal themes. To a certain degree, I was right about my passion being steadfast in the face of the stresses of advanced academic training. There are numerous books from many different countries and eras that piqued my interest beyond them being required reading.  

However, the greatest book in the world cannot fix the fatigue that a bloated reading schedule causes. I knew what I was getting into, of course, but knowing really doesn’t matter after having to read hundreds upon hundreds of pages of say, Garcilaso de la Vega or Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (real ones know!), as I had to do during my Colonial Latin American Literature survey course. For six years, I often felt as though I had one eye on a PDF and one eye on the clock, mentally calculating how long it took to read one page and estimating how quickly I could finish a book before moving on to the next one. However, In early 2021, I found myself free of the constraints of reading under pressure, as I had passed my preliminary exams for my doctoral degree the semester before. 

Turning the page

With my attention now solely focused on crafting my dissertation and teaching Spanish language classes, I had won back something that had been missing during my time taking courses: an eensy, teensy bit of free time. Unfortunately for me, I had also been recently diagnosed with allergic asthma, so some of this free time was spent, once or twice a week, in my allergist’s office, on the receiving end of histamine shots that would (hopefully) reduce the severity of my allergies, while also not inducing anaphylaxis.

In that sterile and uninspiring room, far from the creaky, imposing library shelves I had been dwarfed by for so long, the pressure to read for the purposes of writing papers and bolstering class discussions melted away. Accompanied only by my ancient iPad, loaded with the Libby app, I would spend hours waiting in that office, interrupted intermittently by my doctor checking my airways and the injection site on my arm. At my fingertips was what seemed like an unending catalogue of books whose publications I had missed for the last six years. What’s more, I soon discovered something about me that I never expected: I loved reading horror fiction.

All my life I have hated horror movies. I have only seen one, The Strangers (2008), and even that was against my will. The Halloween of my fourteenth year saw me crowding into my friend’s basement with the rest of our social group, which consisted of teens who were not scaredy-cats like me. Due to a combination of peer pressure and shaky confidence, I agreed to watch the aforementioned horror flick while thinking, “Maybe it won’t be so bad.”

Boy, was I wrong. 

Despite my rejection of slasher films, I wouldn’t consider myself an overly  sensitive person, but my anxious personality is not well-suited to the anticipation and gore of the horror genre. There are some days I refuse to watch even an episode of The X-Files as twilight approaches. So to have been, suddenly, breathlessly waiting for books to come off hold that featured content aimed to terrify was very surprising to me, though I embraced it all the same.

My reading reawakening that began beneath the stale, fluorescent lights in a random medical building in north-central Indiana led to a years-long obsession of reading (when I wasn’t writing my dissertation, of course) anything horror- or thriller-adjacent that I could get my hands on. I devoured litfic that centered around body and/or psychological horror, crimes being committed, anything that boasted showcasing the darker sides of humanity.

I didn’t exclusively read horror and thrillers, but I found myself gravitating back toward such works, desperate for the illusion of control while living in a political landscape that was (and still is) trending anti-woman. In these fictional worlds, women could act on their impulses– something we’re very rarely allowed to do in reality. They may be committing crimes, sure, but aren’t we, as women, allowed a little rage when we’re losing our rights to medical care? Can’t we cheer for women doing exactly as they wish when there are those who wish to take away our rights to vote, to divorce, to be employed? Sadly, to everything there is a season, and it seems as though my time voyeuristically consuming women’s rights and wrongs through fiction has come to a possible end. 

Plot twist

After the birth of my daughter, my anxiety has gone into overdrive in an effort, evolutionarily and biologically, I suppose, to try to maintain my family unit within a small, protective bubble and keep the horrors of the world away. The terror that originally had no effect on me when reading horror is now wholly felt, as if I were back in the eighth grade, in my friend’s basement, watching Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman get stalked and terrorized by three weirdos in masks.

I noticed this change when I was finally able to read Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova, a book about a woman mourning the loss of her child to such a degree that she turns a piece of his body into a sentient monster. I read, maybe, 10 percent of the book when panic began to overtake me. What if I lost my daughter? In our world, sadly devoid of magical realism, I wouldn’t be able to manifest such a creature. I would have nothing. Plenty of parents around the globe have obviously experienced loss, so I would not be special. But, such a fact does not eliminate the disquietude that this concept produces. I returned the book almost immediately. Then, very recently, a similar thing happened while I was reading the beginning pages of The Lamb by Lucy Rose. 

I had read books describing cannibalism before and, while the idea personally disgusts me, I was able to push past this revulsion to see how these gruesome tales proceeded. Now, my response was so visceral, so palpably felt, that not even a can of Vernors ginger ale could remedy my nausea.

Both books had been hyped up on Bookstagram (a community with which, like BookTok, I have many issues but ultimately can’t quit) for months, as certain accounts received advanced reading copies and therefore raved about how good they were before library-using plebs like me could gain access to them. I was so excited to read them, but, this enthusiasm, and the state of my emotional moods, were in direct opposition.  

The militant feminist in me (which, let’s be honest, is most of my personality) is begging me to push through. She, to be frank, doesn’t even think it’s appropriate to confess that motherhood has caused any change. I should be able to engage in the things I enjoy, instead of letting possible internalized patriarchal ideals – that dictate that mothers’ lives should revolve around their children; that they should spend every single second of every single hour of every single day thinking about their children and their needs; that they are not complete people now, but accessories to the new generation – win. Whatever individuality I can eke out, says this feminist, should be celebrated and pursued doggedly.

Cliffhanger?

Unfortunately, overriding my brain is easier said than done. I find that I miss the previous catharsis I relished while reading; I have no outlet for my frustrations. Also, a small part of me fears that, with this change in taste, I’m no longer cool. Is this how the process from eclectic individual to lame parent starts?

Maybe I’ll return to Monstrilio and The Lamb in the future, when I’m more practiced at divorcing reading and my anxieties. Maybe it’s finally time to give Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time a try? Maybe I’ll exclusively read nonfiction until I’m 90. The specifics of my reading habits were different at 10, 17, 25, and will continue to vary at 32, 46, 54, and so on.

I find myself back at square one, in a place akin to where I was in 2021, wanting to read but not sure where that desire will take me. Still, I have progressed before and will again. And, I should emphasize, I’m ultimately grateful that my lifelong passion for reading remains in spite of the hiccups detailed here, and that I have passed that passion on to my daughter, who demands a reading of Frog and Toad Are Friends at least once a day.

For now, I suppose the horror books on my to-be-read list must wait patiently  in their dark corners. But, as the current total of this list, according to my profile on The Storygraph, is 3,308 books, there’s plenty to read in the meantime.