I'm not accusing anyone of stealing mental illness valour with this, though I do think it's a mark against the work that 99% of reactions land somewhere along the 'I'm in this photo, and I don't like it' lines. A lot of Austin's evocations of hyper-neurotic death obsession are pat, obvious to the point of stereotype. Anxiety is portrayed as a bucephalus bouncing ball; Gilda's internal state creeping through endless offshooting directions that all inevitably circle back towards her core obsessions. The prose is jittery and brittle, as is our narrator. The problem is not accuracy; we don't write fiction to identify literal facts but spiritual truths. All of it, its wider plotting and sentence-to-sentence construction, its always-shrinking confrontation-avoidant protagonist, it rings as hollow to me as a 'how to tell if you are...' TikTok because it is the most accessible, understandable, and surface-level representation of itself. Neurotic thoughts are not containable nor consistent; that this book is received as so proper to the experience of the average online everyperson tells me that it fails to plunge deeper than the first-thought representations of anxiety that everyone else has already identified.

Well, mostly. Speaking for myself now, just as an example, panicked episodes (so often likened in art to movement, to scattershot speed, to a desperate need to escape) feel like being pushed through a sieve, my skin reforming as it gets gutted and twisted by the metal, until I'm sat, stuck, sandwiching a web of steel that sits lodged within every single molecule of my body, an infinite, cutting, invisible weight. I'm not saying I want the above in this book. That is my life, not Gilda's. What I want is evidence that Gilda experiences herself in ways specific to her, because that is the spiritual truth, that your mental state always manifests relative to you. There is one moment, buried in this book, where Eileen (Gilda's girlfriend) gives her the present of a box of thin mints, having remembered some past time Gilda had mentioned liking them. The knowledge that she is attentively loved by this person strikes Gilda so forcefully that she hides the box away to block any association with this love from forming in her mind. This rejection of a base joy of life, this inability to interface with another person's warmth, for fear of its eventual extinguishment, better to never have anything in this world than to one day lose it; that sadness, that discomfort, felt true. I wish I felt that with this book more than once. To then tie the whole thing up in such a neat bow, as Austin does, to not leave even one string dangling, to absolve our protagonist of any guilt, misses the picture so entirely that I'm left wondering what she thought she was drawing.