In response to these fantasies, my eczema, which had disfigured my fingers when I was a small child to the point that I had to wear vaselined vinyl gloves to school, returned with vigor, so that my hands looked the way I imagined my whole body might, the skin filled with tiny bubbles of fluid that would burst and crack.

I wish that I’d had access when I was younger to a book like George Scialabba’s How to Be Depressed, which gives a mercifully matter-of-fact explanation of what depression is, one that I would have recognized immediately as my own experience and found helpful, perhaps even as a child: “We are all issued neurological shock absorbers, usually good

Breakdown was what happened when their gorgeous shells became so brittle and delicate they could be shattered with the slightest tap of the back of a spoon—tenderly set and ready to ooze out of their gelid whites with a hot, vividly compelling, golden violence.

I was afraid I wouldn’t pass the test.

I can’t pinpoint almost any of what happened then in single events, both because I could never directly look at them in the first place, and because I can’t see them directly in retrospect now. I can only tell you how the tissue of time around and between them felt.

Probably not, because you’re just crying, for God’s sake, and you cry all the time what with all the current apocalypses, especially if you’re not doing so well at work, or you spent too much time reading comments online, or people are moving on with their lives around you, or families are making their normal, irremediable family trouble.

All my crises are scrawled in the margins of the novels I’ve read over and over again, sometimes to feel safe, sometimes to sink willfully into further despair.

This happens a lot, that feeling when I can’t remember if I thought a thought or if a book planted it in my brain, and it’s just now popped up from wherever it was hiding. Part of my fate as a greedy, acquisitive reader is that I can never escape the overbearing presence of books, whether in the mind or on the shelf. I wonder if, without them, I’d

This, like many of my anxieties, is both literal and literary. While the fear of death-by-shelf is a very real,