book recommendation: _ally_ by Madison Scott-Clary

[rax]

First, a note on me, a white person, recommending a book by another white person right now to a mostly non-Black readership: I'm not expecting this recommendation to leave my social circles [0] and thus I assume you're already also reading works by Black authors and donating money to Black causes, &c. If you're not, or you're looking for more, have you already checked out Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis? It's the book that I was working on until ally showed up in the mail this past weekend and I couldn't flip through it without reading the whole thing, and it's what I'm going back to when I finish this post. The publisher is no longer giving away ebooks, but they're still on sale, and if you can't afford that right now, it's also pretty easy to come by online.

That said: This past weekend I read ally by Madison Scott-Clary [1], and I found it a deeply rewarding experience. ally is a fictionalized memoir in which Scott-Clary grapples with issues of mental health, sexual and asexual identity (there's some excellent writing about aceness in here!), what it means to have a self, how abuse and trauma affect those things, and, excitingly for at least me, how being a hopelessly nerdy furry specifically inflects all of that in really interesting directions. It's a typographical adventure (the whole thing is produced in LaTeX), with the inclusion of sheet music, threaded stories, interlocking footnotes, and subtle but crucial uses of color. (Think House of Leaves, although it's less frenetic, or one of the really good Catgirl Goth Rave invites.) That alone is probably enough enticement for some of y'all, but I am really excited to recommend it for another specific reason: I think it's my favorite plural memoir.
 

In order to explain why, I need to start with the premise of the work. Scott-Clary's description is a good start:

ally is an ergodic, arborescent, semiautobiographical work about identity, mental health, spirituality, and the mutability of the past. A lot of the information contained within is real, some of it isn’t. Each page is structured as a conversation between myself and my ally, a mirror reflection of myself.

This ally is summoned (Scott-Clary uses "invoked") seemingly for the purposes of this project, although they also existed beforehand. The ally is insistent that they [3] are not a friend, and that certain things are "Not [their] department," but while they are pushy about certain topics or events, they are ultimately, in my reading, pushing Scott-Clary to better understand and contextualize her experiences; the ally is a sort of supportive collaborator, but not quite an inner therapeutic voice? Therapists aren't that snarky, and therapists aren't low-key aware of their intended consumption by an external audience. (A dynamic that significantly complicates this kind of internality. [4]) The ally also plays the role of an informed reader, reacting to the things that Scott-Clary says, and by the end of the book we are following along with them, now also knowing many of the details of Scott-Clary's life, able to anticipate and echo their interjections and suggestions to move from topic X to topic Y. It's fun.

Classic plural memoir isn't fun. Books like The Flock or When Rabbit Howls have moments of joy but at least to me as a reader have this almost prurient gaze into the suffering of people with MPD/DID and this expectation that over time, your awareness of the narrator's trauma will build, producing sympathy and pity and revulsion, and then offering you a journey with them to share in their therapeutically-approved catharsis so that you now are more accepting of folks with this disorder and also in awe of the brave, rule-breaking psychologists who often coauthor and always leave a significant stamp on these works, and how wonderful they are. I think usually they're not wonderful; I wasn't in those therapeutic sessions so I don't know, but I think that often the folks with the bad boundaries in those stories are more the therapists than the patients. The ally, in contrast, is Scott-Clary, and the book is a continuous negotiation between them about what their boundaries are, what they're ready to talk about, how much they will share. And I do mean both of them; what is "That's not my department" but a statement of boundaries? [6]

Contemporary plural memoir, creative non-fiction, &c. tries to work around this, and there are a bunch of other things I think are great, even though they might borrow more heavily from that lurid psychologist-approved tradition then they might like. [7] But when you're writing from inside the plural community and for the plural community, you have to engage in all of these heavyweight conversations about endogenic versus traumagenic, diagnostic categories, turf wars, and just... it's exhausting, and presupposes a bunch of things about the field of discourse, and makes it really hard to step outside all of that entirely. Scott-Clary, as far as I can tell, accidentally solved this problem by never stepping into it, a line of play admittedly no longer available to some of us but brilliant in its simplicity. She and her ally surely given their social group are aware of the existence of plural systems, but to them, at least in the world of the text, it is not a question worth considering. We must take her and her ally at face value; we must accept the panoply of her experience as they present it together; it's hard enough to label the experiences described: are they ace? was that trauma? is this grief? Fuck trying to label the secondary effects. Who has time for that?

But reading it as a plural person or people or whatever, the language for this will suck forever, it's fresh air after months stuck indoors. One needn't classify the experience of multiple selves in order to express it, inhabit it, even build on it in order to examine it. Scott-Clary, even inside the narrative, exists in a nebulous space I wouldn't call explicitly plural but wouldn't call explicitly singlet either. Like many folks, she talks about some portion of her history as a mythical Before Times [8] that can at best be partially understood, and uses her deadname as a sort-of-but-not-entirely separate person who is dead now. Ish. The work of writing ally --- the work of being an ally --- can also be understood as an attempt to produce a new Scott-Clary, plurality in serial instead of in parallel, collaboratively producing from oneselves a one self. (Me holding this up like a butterfly: Is this integration?) There's also just a hint, from time to time, that Scott-Clary and her ally might not be alone. I don't think that's the most important part of the work, but for me, reading from my standpoint, it's something I'm naturally attuned to:
 

Am I worthy of forgiveness?
 

Not my department.

Right.

Let me throw that back at you. That is my department. Are you worthy of forgiveness?

Of course I am. That’s something I can answer immediately on an intellectual level. There is decidedly more hesitation when asked to answer that on an emotional level, though. And when it comes to that third-of-three parts, that part defined by negative space and shadow and blind spots–

My neighbor.

–then no, I am not. Not by a long shot.

This excerpt is from a section of ally written on June 10, 2020, about unemployment, and you might be thinking "how would any of this have been written a week ago and be in print," and spoilers, it's a hypertext! I personally really recommend the book form, I think the physical artifactiness of it does a lot of work, but you can read all of ally at ally.id, too, and have a different experience exploring the text than I did, and it's still going. I've poked at it online a bit, and it can do things that the print copy can't do, like this awesome map of the whole work thus far, but it also doesn't feel as approachable or as permanent, for me at least, as the book does. There's something about reading a MUCK log that's been printed into a book that's just very different from reading a MUCK log on a comupter screen. I read chat logs all the time. I don't hold a book and read them and think of them as history ever. And I don't hardly ever read them, occasionally notice names I know, and realize it's a history that I'm in some way connected to, that many of you reading this right now are in some way connected to, because furry history is queer history, furry history is increasingly trans history, and so much of it is stored in logfiles of ephemeral online interactions that are bitrotting away as we speak. This one --- a particular tragic moment in a particular small community --- is now archived forever, or at least as long as books last, in print. That matters to me more than I expected.

"That matters to me more than I expected," said about someone else's life, is my summary of this whole book.

If you like the way I ramble in pieces like this or in the ridiculously long emails I send out once a year, and you find it matters to you more than you expected, my point to all of this is: Scott-Clary can do that, too, and she's done a whole book of it, and it has cool typography to boot. You should read it. It's even a great time to buy it if that's a line of flight available to you. In addition, if you're interested in plural memoir, or experiences tangential to plural experiences, or just ways to write about multiplicity without centering multiplicity: seriously, check this shit out. It's great. I'm not sure if this is plural history --- an idea I think is still trying to define itself --- but I think it's very likely to say something interesting to you about our possible plural futures.

 

 

[0] If it did, hi! I don't really use dreamwidth much anymore, this just felt less snooty than medium and more permanent than pastebin for "I want to throw a blob of prose on the Internet."

[1] A friendquaintance --- "acquaintance" feels like it doesn't give enough credit to the serious conversations we've had but "friend" feels presumptuous --- such that I'm not really sure if I should call her "Maddy" or "Madison" or "Scott-Clary" when writing this, and we're socially connected enough that I had the experience of learning that an ex got SRS because of a throwaway line in the book. [2] Maddy's great, at least in all of my experiences with her, but this recommendation isn't really about that.

[2] Congrats, I guess? :P

[3] This is the "they" of uncertainty rather than specificity. The author's pronoun is she; the ally's could be the same, or might not, it's never stated. I use they in part out of respect for the possibility it might be different and in part for ease of distinguishing the two. Who are also the same person. Give or take.

[4] Making the subtext into text here, I do identify as plural, and this reminds me so much of some of our internal system meetings, but the knowledge of a potential future reader changes dynamics enough that we have an explicit policy of not sharing any meeting logs, with only occasional excerpting if it's unanimously approved by people mentioned or talking in the excerpt. [5] Scott-Clary and her ally doing this live on stage and still successing at doing the work is admirable.)

[5] This is a shame, because I assure you, they are really funny.

[6] I find it touching that often, even when expressing a boundary about what roles they will or won't fill, the ally tries to find the next closest thing they can say to help. It's very caring, to my read, a thing I don't think they were necessarily required to be.

[7] I'm not trying to be snarky; I struggle with this tremendously when I try to write about this shit, and guess from other folks' writing that they do the same. It's possible I'm wrong and it's just me.

[8] Turns out this phrase I think I've heard almost every trans system I know use is from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, meant to refer to the time before the apocalypse. Seems appropriate to me.

Comments

[phi]

I started reading this today, the online version, on the strength of this recommendation. I'm on page 5 of 33 in the online formatting, and riveted. I'm also about a sixth of the way through _Something That May Shock and Discredit You_ which author line says Daniel Mallory Ortberg but he changed his name shortly after publication to Danny M Lavery. I feel like these two works complement each other in interesting ways.

[drab_makyo]

Oh! I've been interested in picking that up. May have to give it a go, at that :)

[rax]

ooh, i will add that to my reading list, thank you! i'm glad you are also finding ally riveting and i think that reading this as part of the tradition of trans memoirs is probably also really interesting. i will have to take that lens to it sometime too :D

[sovay]

I don't really use dreamwidth much anymore, this just felt less snooty than medium and more permanent than pastebin for "I want to throw a blob of prose on the Internet."

And I wouldn't have seen it on either of those platforms, so I'm glad you put it here!

[rax]

and i'm glad you saw it, so i guess that's positive feedback for using dreamwidth! :D

[kelkyag]

What sovay said. Glad you're back, even if it's briefly, and thank you for the recommendation, which sounds fascinating.

(Seemed like the some of the Raxen who were frequent dreamwidth posters hadn't been active much recently/last I knew.

[5] This is a shame, because I assure you, they are really funny.

Writing things that aren't meeting logs is an option?

[rax]

yeah, posting to dreamwitdh is definitely not so much a me thing and i (rhess) kind of can't help being out almost all the time right now. but i'm glad to get to say hi!

i should write more things that aren't meeting logs!

[kelkyag]

DW is a tool. When it works for you, great! If/when not ... well, I wouldn't sneeze at pointers to wherever else you (collectively) might decide to post.

"Should" is a big heavy pushy word, though. Writing to share with the world is a possibility, not an obligation.

Don't burn yourself (rhess) out, please?

P.S. The new icons are adorable!

[rax]

I wanted a small random task to do, so I uploaded a bunch of new icons, and didn't realize that I would be replacing existing ones by using the same keyword. It seems to have worked out, though! I'm glad you like them. We should really post all of the art of ourselves we've commissioned... anywhere.

Sadly "don't burn rhess out" isn't looking good for our protagonists. But pretty art!

[kelkyag]

I hope you didn't lose any of the icons. It looked like the major change was that the new rhess icon was the default icon for a bit (so that filled in anywhere that'd been left blank), but it looks like you're back to no default?

You have a website for yourselves -- seems like a fine place to post artwork?

Resigned to burnout sounds rather bad. :(

[drab_makyo]

Dang! Thank you for such a thorough review! When starting the project, I'd honestly never really thought about it from a plural point of view. Interacting with the ally was just...a thing I did. Hearing it from this point of view, thought, has me desperately wanting to read up on such viewpoints (though I'll admit that some of your descriptions of plural memoirs sound a little harrowing).

Is it alright if I post about it with some excerpts?

[rax]

feel free to excerpt or post about as you'd like!

in terms of plural memoir specifically, a lot of plural folks (though certainly not all) experience plurality as deeply linked to trauma, and so trauma figures prominently in that work. it's not necessarily a bad thing --- i can think of recent work where it's not like it's fun to read about the trauma or anything but it isn't written for tourists, for example LB Lee's All in the Family. that kind of memoir means a lot to me because i do experience plurality in... well, close to the way the medical literature suggests, it's still ultimately a diagnostic category and not a descriptive category, but it fits well enough that that stuff feels like my history and i want to understand it.

what you and the ally describe --- from the outside, obviously --- sounds like some other forms of plurality that i don't know as well how to point you at. there are a few small traditions where folks create/invoke a separate entity inside themself to talk to and/or perform tasks for them. you might look for "daemon" or "thoughtform" or "servitor" or "tulpa" --- tulpa probably has the most resources although (a) it's sort of a misappropriation of a misappropriation terminology-wise and (b) the tulpa scene kind of got overrun by, and Maddy i cannot express to you in human language how much i wish i were joking when i type these words, 4chan kids intentionally dissociating in order to create copies of my little pony characters in their heads who were interested in sleeping with them, so like. it's a little bit of a tire fire over there. but there's still useful resources and knowledgeable people and &c.

you might also find resources on median systems interesting --- median systems are roughly "folks who are more than one person but only sort of, they're all really the same, but they're like. internally distinct lenses or filters that have some person-nature to them" ... that's... maybe i should go find a definition someone else wrote. :P here's a couple things:

http://healthymultiplicity.com/loonybrain/Info/median_article.html
https://web.archive.org/web/19990203092522/http://www.asarian.org/%7Evickis/continuum.html (yes we pass around archive.org links to old plural content because otherwise it would have died long ago all the time :P )

honestly i care a lot about like... plurality education and trying to make all kinds of plural lives more livable so if you ever wanna just talk about this stuff we'd be happy to, also!

[rax]

it was pointed out to me by someone else in my head (natch) that i was maybe slightly hard on tulpamancy, as while those folks definitely exist and are loud there are other resources. i asked around in the community and came up with https://tulpa.io/what-is-a-tulpa as worth checking out. you know, if you need More Links :P

[lb_lee]

Thanks for the shout-out! Man, when Quandary explained the whole MLP 4chan bit of tulpas to me, I thought they were taking the piss. OH HOW I LEARNED.

And yeah, it's sadly so true, about ye olde multi memoirs, there IS that lurid voyeurism to it. And it makes me uncomfortable, because I feel like AllFam, no matter how hard I tried, could never really escape that legacy. So even though they're fluffier, I try to write more happy stuff, like Alter Boys in Love now.

Oh man, I might have to hang onto this rec for something to read, I'm JONESING for plural stuff that isn't... you know. Awful. Because it's sad to me to realize how I have to gird myself to read plural stuff, because so much of it is trauma memoir.

(Also glad to see y'all back here, Rax, even if you ain't really here no more.)

[rax]

reading plural memoir is always such an experience and it was so lovely to have it be a positive experience instead of a "well i'm glad to know more of my history and also i'm gonna go be sad for a while now" experience!

i should really read more of your happy stuff :D

[lb_lee]

People are suckers for trainwrecks! But I am indeed trying to get out from under it. But yeah, it's... it's not fun to read. I sympathize with your plight so hard.

--Rogan

[lb_lee]

Hey, Rax, would you be okay giving me content warnings for ally? I want to add it to pluralstories but am up to my eyeballs in books and probably can't get to this one for a long while.

[rax]

Hi, absolutely!

The author's content warnings are:

Content warning: Several sections focus on suicide, self-harm, rape, sexual content, and poor mental health.

I would add death and allusions to child abuse (it's not detailed at all, but it's sort of hovering in the margins in a way that someone might want mentioned).

[lb_lee]

Thanks, Juniper! And would it be okay if I copy/paste what y'all wrote up in these posts? That would, I think, give all the needed info!

[lhexan]

I want to buy it on the strength of this recommendation... but I can only find the print version for $50. Is that normal?

On the subject of plural quasi-autobiographies, a friend has been writing one called Inori Literature Club, about a path not taken. It's sort of an anti-Doki Doki Literature Club, in that it starts out as a horror story then gives way to immense cuteness. They gave me permission to mention it.

I hope my presence does not cause distress. If it does, that is adequate reason not to interact with me. -_-

[drab_makyo]

It's up for $35 at https://ally.id/book if you buy direct. Markup for other distributors is unfortunately high. Any lower, and it costs me money :P

There's a PDF version as well, which I'm happy to send if you're interested.

[lhexan]

Ah... it says it's sold out. Will there be another print run?

I prefer physical media too. ^_^

[drab_makyo]

If you select 'first-run paperback' under the style, I do still have a few of those! They're on a thinner stock which caused some crinkling problems on high-saturation pages, but still essentially the same. I'll be getting the next box of the current run soon, though~

[lhexan]

Okay, I'll wait for the thicker-stock copy, and leave an undeleted reply notification to remind me to buy it. :3

[drab_makyo]

I've added one more thicker-stock copy! I usually keep one of every book, but with another box on the way, I don't feel too bad doing so. Feel free to order.

[lhexan]

Done. :D

[lhexan]

On the off chance I have something to intelligent to say, how do you prefer to receive feedback? This Dreamwidth account is comments-only, and I saw there was no contact information on your website.

[drab_makyo]

https://makyo.is will have contact info! If it's public, a post like this or a review on Goodreads or similar is also v much appreciated, as those also help reach other potential readers.

[lhexan]

Ah, thanks! I could not find my way there from writing.drab-makyo.com.

[gaudior]

and also in awe of the brave, rule-breaking psychologists

This. This, this, this. Is such a problem with those memoirs, and the lack of it makes this one even more appealing.

Thank you for writing this, and I look forward to reading it when I next, you know, read things.

<3
R

[rax]

yeahhhhh. It's Complicated but also sometimes it isn't _that_ complicated and actually some of those psychologists were just straight-up wack.