Sad Janet: A Novel - Hardcover

Britsch, Lucie

 
9780593086520: Sad Janet: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 059308652X ISBN 13: 9780593086520
Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Named one of the Best Books of the Summer by Lit Hub, The Millions, Refinery29, and Hey Alma.

“Hilarious, wise, wicked, and tender.” —Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, The New York Times–bestselling author of The Nest

Janet works at a rundown dog shelter in the woods. She wears black, loves The Smiths, and can’t wait to get rid of her passive-aggressive boyfriend. Her brain is full of anxiety, like “one of those closets you never want to open because everything will fall out and crush you.” She has a meddlesome family, eccentric coworkers, one old friend who’s left her for Ibiza, and one new friend who’s really just a neighbor she sees in the hallway. Most of all, Janet has her sadness—a comfortable cloak she uses to insulate herself from the oppressions of the wider world.

That is, until one fateful summer when word spreads about a new pill that offers even cynics like her a short-term taste of happiness . . . .just long enough to make it through the holidays without wanting to stab someone with a candy cane. When her family stages an intervention, her boyfriend leaves, and the prospect of making it through Christmas alone seems like too much, Janet decides to give them what they want. What follows is life-changing for all concerned—in ways no one quite expects.

Hilarious, bitterly wise, and surprisingly warm, Sad Janet is the depression comedy you never knew you needed.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lucie Britsch’s writing has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Split Lip Magazine, and The Sun magazine, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Sad Janet is her first novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One
 
I’m lying in bed watching TV and some man on some morning show is telling me there are one hundred and eighty-one days till Christmas. I need to be ready, apparently, like there’s a war coming, or a storm. It’s both.

I switch off the man and the TV. I have to get up and get myself to work, and I do both those things and feel like a goddamn hero. My boyfriend does the same, but it’s no big deal to him, which is annoying. He’s annoying.

One hundred and eighty-one days. That’s half a year to worry that I won’t be able to get it up for Santa, or my boyfriend, or myself even. That’s a lot of normal feeling-crappy, with the extra worry that I’ll feel crappy at Christmas, when I’d rather feel something else—not happy, god no, what even is that?, but different. I’ll probably just feel drunk, and then I won’t be able to get it up for anyone, but just let everything happen to me, like most years.

As soon as I get home from work, I switch on the TV, my only true friend maybe, since my boyfriend’s not home. I think he said he was doing something, but he lost me at doing. A woman with giant breasts and giant lips comes on the screen. She’s at some over-the-top kid’s birthday party, and she’s saying that life is about being happy. Why isn’t that child in bed? I’m thinking. My only maternal thoughts come at random times, over random things.

She’s from a sex tape. The woman, not the child. She spent all her sex-tape money on this kid’s birthday party. It’s obscene, the party, but she’s happy. The woman, not the child. The child looks crazy. They all look crazy.

I switch off the large-breasted woman and the TV and try to sleep. A hundred and eighty-one days. I need to be ready.

The next day at work I’m supposed to be brainstorming ways we can get more money, because we have none, but I’m mostly thinking about sadness. Melissa is thinking the shit out of ways we can make more money, any money, and Debs is regretting mentioning it. All of Melissa’s ideas involve us baking, for some reason but we’re not listening.

I’m thinking about how the world is awful right now but I think I always knew it was.
For as long as I can remember feeling things, I’ve felt sadness. Now, for example, I feel sad that we have no money. Also a little mad that a bunch of idiots seem to have it all. But sad, mostly, because I think that’s just the way things are, and baking cupcakes isn’t going to get us enough money to make our lives mean anything.

But that’s not the sadness I’m preoccupied with. Mine isn’t one I can put my finger on. It’s an all-encompassing feeling, like my lungs are filled with it instead of air. It’s not me, but it surrounds me, so it’s become me by osmosis.

You’d think it would feel better to be at one with the world.

People don’t like this sadness of mine. They’ll do anything to pretend it’s not there, that I’m not there. If I hadn’t chosen to work out here in the woods, at a rundown dog shelter, they would have banished me someplace similar, like an outlet mall.

I’m here, though, just barely. Hi.

There’s no word in the English language that properly describes this feeling I have, the one that makes other people uncomfortable. The one that people want me to fix—with makeup, a clean sweater, or a dress, a nice pretty dress, and some girls’ shoes, not boots, not men’s anyway, as if boots give a crap about gender. As if a man can’t wear a dress now. Or a dog.

The Japanese have a term for it: mono no aware, the sadness of things.

The existentialists made it a whole thing—literally made the emptiness of life into a movement—but you have to embrace the sadness to be in their club. I might consider it, if Sartre wasn’t such a misogynist.

The French call it malaise, I think, which makes it sound like a condiment.

The cool kids call it melancholia, because of that Lars Von Trier movie where Kirsten Dunst sobbed at the moon.

The old people used to say bone sad, but I think that was because they were all malnourished and dying of exciting things like rickets and syphilis.

My mother just calls it moody. Difficult.

But the Japanese get it. They have fourteen words for it that don’t exist in the English language, for this feeling that staying afloat is almost impossible.

I’m fine with all of it, whatever you want to call it.

I’m not a goth, though, so there’s hope.
 
 

People are really into this happiness thing, though. They really want me to be happy, and I’m really not that fussed. I’ve dabbled with happiness, I want to tell them, but it never stuck.

I want to say to Melissa, I would fucking love to be thinking about cupcakes and shit right now, but my brain doesn’t work like yours.

Sometimes I think it was my fault that I let the sadness in. I used to make these crying tapes of sad songs that I’d listen to at night when I was in my bed when I was supposed to be sleeping but I wasn’t, I was crying. Crying for all the shitty things I knew were coming. I wasn’t even a teenager yet, but I felt tender and raw and open to all the pain. All those dumb songs about love and heartbreak. I should have been listening to the fucking Muppets.

So maybe I willed it to me, the sadness. And since then I’ve been storing it all up when I should have been throwing it out. Hoarding sadness like I think there’ll be a TV show about it one day and someone is about to come and help me sort my life out.

No one is coming.

Melissa is saying something about a car wash now and it’s gone too far. Like she thinks I’m ever actually going to take my coat off. That underneath this is a bikini body I’ve been hiding and it’s the answer to all our prayers.

A car drives past and I catch a second of some boy band I shouldn’t know but I do because you can’t avoid them.

I should be happy, apparently. Not because we’ve just won the war on terrorism, or survived a near-fatal collision with an asteroid, or found the cure for cancer, but because happiness is right there for the taking, if I would only take my butt down to my doctor and then to the pharmacy. Even just a smile might do it.

But I can’t find the words for my hollow feeling. What I need is for someone to see me stood here in my giant coat, holding a bag of dog shit, trying to get on with my day, while Melissa talks at me about bake sales and car washes and moonbeams, and to see that I’m not okay with any of it.
 
 

Anti-depressants are good now, they say. Real progress has been made.

Melissa is on Lexapro. Debs is on good old-fashioned Prozac; she prides herself on being one of the originals. Whoever was driving that car playing the boy band was definitely taking something. Everyone is taking something but me.

My best friend, Emma, started taking Zoloft because she got a free hat. She wasn’t a hat person, but she thought she might be if she was happier. She never did, but she did feel better, so much so that she ran away to Ibiza and never came back. I can’t even pronounce Ibiza.

On the plus side, there’s no stigma now that everyone’s medicated. It’s a huge relief for a lot of people and I’m genuinely happy for them. Yay drugs! It still doesn’t mean I want to take any pills.
No one wants to take...

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Verlag
Riverhead Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059308652X
ISBN 13 
9780593086520
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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