How did I become a writer who could no longer write? This is the question Rebecca van Laer sets out to answer in her debut novella How to Adjust to the Dark, which weaves fiction, poetry and literary criticism to trace the journey of a self-proclaimed ex-poet as she examines her past writing and, through that painful process, wrestles with her identity.

Although van Laer is critiquing her own poetry, she uses a fictional protagonist to draw a narrative arc linking the poems to her life story. We meet Charlotte, a smart, rebellious academic, after she has “retired as a poet.” The words flow no more — she cannot bring herself to “write a personal note in a birthday card, much less a poem.” When a fortune cookie message cuts through Charlotte’s mollifying cushion of consumerist self-help, she decides to revisit her poems as a way to analyse herself and make the writing “useful again.” The process is guided by her interest in Foucault’s notion of writing as a technology of the self, the goal of which is “not just to know oneself but to ‘form oneself, to surpass oneself, to master the appetites that threaten to overwhelm one.’”

At the heart of the novel is the examination of the myths we create about ourselves. Indeed, as the narrator asks, “Doesn’t all writing begin with the artist making up a myth about herself?” In Charlotte’s case, she has formed a personality around the myth of the Poetess Tortured by Love. Driven by the desire to be desired, Charlotte becomes involved in destructive relationships with men who scorn and abuse her, and, in the most shocking case, stalk and threaten her to the point she is “afraid to walk four blocks home alone at night.”

With her mental and physical health suffering, Charlotte turns to drugs and alcohol. The reader is swept along by the raw depiction of Charlotte’s downward spiral, but what makes her plight so poignant is that it is all too recognisable for many of us who have (hopefully) made it through similar situations. As a poet, however, Charlotte feels she has some element of control as long as she can transform her suffering into art. Over time, the relationship between self, other and art becomes reflexive. Does she need to suffer in order to be a poet? Or does being a poet give licence to her suffering? As she says, “Poetry became a way to both divert and perform pain: to hold it at a distance, to make it something else.”

It is in the mining of van Laer’s poetry that the novel finds its structure. Each chapter is predicated on chronologically selected poems which spur the narrative and the analysis. Each poem is a rung on a ladder that descends into the depths of the narrator’s self.

Ironically, as the poet’s skill increases, so her life disintegrates. The poems flatten under analysis, removing the space into which the reader can develop their own meaning. Charlotte is fully aware of this outcome. For while she has been transforming her pain into “stylised fragments,” she has also been giving her poems up to the critique of her instructors, peers, and even the very men who inspired the words. By reading herself back into the poems, not only does she reclaim their artistic space as her own but she also learns that she wants to “destroy everything that had made those poems possible. Everything I was taught about what it means to be a writer, an artist, and a woman. Everything I was told about what it means to be traumatised, and depressed, and diagnosed. None of these beliefs made me happy — they just made poems.”

Van Laer’s novella is delightfully tricky to pin down. It slips across the boundaries between genres, and the subject matter itself doesn’t hold still. The narrative can be summarised, and the themes of identity and power are evident. The analysis of the poems is clear and insightful. The prose is pithy and matter-of-fact; the scenes depicted, raw and relatable. And yet, the reader is left with the sense that, despite having come so close to the narrator’s consciousness, the self can never be truly fixed. Rather, the self can only be measured in relation to context.

This, then, is van Laer’s thesis; the self is most legible in relationship, whether that be to others, to one’s work or to larger societal structures. “To look back,” she says, “to be present, to reshape oneself for the future — this is no easy task. Yet in taking this power over the self, one learns to live more freely within the larger structures of power that are inescapable.” The reader is rooting for Charlotte to reclaim what she feels she has lost, for her journey resonates with a deep-seated need within us all to understand, as her fortune cookie foretold, what we are running from and to and why. Van Laer shows us that in understanding the what and the why we are able to know the who — and within that we may discover healing and hope.

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