"Motherhood has inserted an immersion blender into her psyche: lust, repulsion, pleasure, and doom swirl into a single mess. She calls herself a "sodomising rodent" with "bullet-wounds for eyes," and thinks, "When I masturbate I desecrate crypts, and when I rock my baby I say amen, and when I smile I unplug an iron lung." One night, standing in the cold, staring at her family through a sliding door, she thinks, "I'll stop trying to draw blood from a stone. I'll contain my madness, I'll use the bathroom. I'll put my baby to sleep, jerk off my man and postpone my rebellion in favor of a better life." She's joking."
"Martin Scorsese saw a brief review of the novel in the Guardian some years ago and decided to pick up a copy. He found it to be a "powerful mosaic of the mind," he told me recently. Scorsese is a member of a book club of sorts, with a few other filmmakers, who read with an eye toward adaptation. For "Die, My Love," he imagined casting Jennifer Lawrence in the lead. He'd been amazed by her performance in Darren Aronofsky's bewildering 2017 fantasia, "Mother!""
A new mother living in rural France narrates a collapse of sanity in language that fuses lust, revulsion, ritual and sacrilege. The psyche becomes a violent, surreal arena where caregiving and desecration coexist: masturbation is described as desecrating crypts while rocking the baby is called amen. Animalistic and mechanical imagery—sodomising rodent, bullet-wounds for eyes, unplugging an iron lung—conveys fragmentation and hallucination. Dark humor and grotesque confessions puncture maternal idealization as the narrator contemplates containing madness and postponing rebellion. The prose's intensity and cinematic, allegorical quality have attracted filmmakers considering a screen adaptation.
Read at The New Yorker
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