If you wanted to live like a punk but talk like a poet, or if you wanted to be a poet but never quite made it and settled for being a punk — 

If, at what should be the end of the night, you find your body swaying in an unknown side street, trying to remember which quiet gray building holds a secret discotheque in its basement — 

If movement is your body’s language —

If, when you wake up smeared in three shades of lipstick, your first thought is about your fucking cat —

then you’ll chew up Zippermouth by Laurie Weeks, gnashing the words into tiny fragments you can swallow and paste to your heart.

In Zippermouth, Weeks’ narrator stumbles around 1990s New York City, hopelessly longing. Longing for heroin and acceptance and jobs and her straight best friend. As someone who spent a good portion of my youth responding to longing by throwing myself against the jagged edges of the world, I think this book conveys a hunger for transformation by any means necessary, pushing until change becomes the only familiar form. While reading, I catch myself, alongside Weeks’ narrator, in a place where wanting and desire and compulsion become inextricably mixed — to the point of mute difference. 

When Weeks’ narrator wakes up on time, feeling pretty fucking impressed with her efforts, she’s punished by the realization that she has to do it all over again the next day. And when she wakes up late and hungover, while a flock of the “doers of the ordinary” swarm past her window in waves of competency, she wonders how they can walk with their heads down through a world in which every injured pigeon contains the entirety of existence. Meanwhile, she is stuck teetertottering between shame and superiority, fleeing to deeper shadows in the hope of finding something worthy of being wanted inside of this nihilistic machine — yet ultimately unable not to love this world to the point that it juices her like a lemon.

“We lived in a neighborhood of mumbling cadavers who emerged to gather their mail before returning to their solariums and sliding glass doors,” Weeks writes, “walls rippling with sparkle from the pools where gelatinous anima floated, face down. I’d be poor, pay cheap rent for my garret; I’d be incandescent, thermonuclear with the Joy of Art and Living Free.”

When I left home, I knew I would never go back, and it was difficult to imagine a future beyond my twenties. Just escaping my small Midwestern town seemed like a life’s work. But then, I woke up to cold mornings and diabolical hangovers, feeling like I’d been alive forever and wasn’t anywhere close to collecting social security with nothing to do but keep living and watching TV. Living like a ghost between selves of function and infinity. Searching for the “moments of intense compression where things coalesce and flash up in your body” and make you randomly ask, as Weeks’ narrator does, “Are we secretly smoking PCP?” 

While words often sit still on a page, Weeks’ maintain the velocity of her narrator’s life. Her writing makes me taste sticky bathroom floors on the back of my tongue, makes cracked windows in the apartment feel like tooth aches, makes me aware of every sharp object in the room, makes danger feel like love and monotony feel worse than death. She constantly reminds me: “The body is a great thing… a horrifying thing, a great and horrifying thing to be trapped in… you’re just hanging on with clenched teeth to a rope that swings your body sickeningly around and around over that bottomless and legendary thing we’ve come to identify as The Abyss.”

Most of us will do some pretty gnarly shit to forget about that abyss for a few seconds, but horrifically, as Weeks knows, we’ll sometimes do even gnarlier shit to peek over the edge. And maybe, deep down, we believe ignoring this abyss is for suckers — for those who’ve bought into easy answers and cliches. Yet the finite is still just as frightening as the infinite, and Weeks doesn’t let us escape either.