Margot, the famous daughter of punk rock royalty, is fleeing her turbulent, and very public, New York City life for the quiet serenity of Montana. Reeling from an emotionally-abusive relationship with a much older man known only as The Director, the narrator begins her story in an airplane bathroom, blood dripping from a self-inflicted wound on her mouth. She’s en route to her best friend Lucy’s remote, seldom-used family home, on a journey she describes as a “Hollywood-type thing: girl leaves small town for the big city” right before warning us of a pending inversion of the traditional coming-of-age formula: in her rendition, everything is “in reverse.” 

Stephanie LaCava’s second novel, I Fear My Pain Interests You, is a haunting work of psychological fiction. It’s unrelenting in its bleakness as it paints a careful yet devastating portrait of a young woman’s mental and emotional undoing. I Fear My Pain is about the familial traumas that damaged Margot and about her struggle to not repeat the behavior that left her so traumatized in the first place. “Trauma can be transformed,” Lucy tells Margot, “Even generations later. Someone decides it won’t be the excuse for their own bad behavior.” I Fear My Pain finds Margot at rock bottom, at the nadir of the fallout from her traumatic past, as it grapples with whether or not Lucy’s characteristically optimistic advice rings true: Can Margot outrun her past? Can anyone? 

Margot’s story is complicated by a rare medical condition: she is congenitally unable to feel pain. Her condition fits neatly with the novel’s promise of a Hollywood coming-of-age tale told “in reverse.” While most stories about young adults feature protagonists grappling with their nearly-unbearable adolescent vulnerability, Margot is almost superhuman in her invulnerability. Any feeling she does convey is simply a reaction, a mirror, a projection of what she imagines others think she should be feeling, since she can’t feel anything herself. “My mother had freaked out,” says Margot of an incident in which she violently electrocuted herself. “I logged that… I kept pretending, taking cues from reactions. I mimicked the onlooker’s level of intensity.”

Central to LaCava’s novel is the idea that everyone is constantly performing, shapeshifting in response to the environment. Margot is an expert at such performances. This is, in part, due to her condition. It’s also a result of her acting vocation. But it’s also the effect of a childhood lived under a microscope, having been born into a family of celebrities. Of her father Margot says, “Outside he was attentive, carried me close” but “away from the public, that switched over.” There is no need for affection behind closed doors, her father’s behavior suggests, because there is no audience. Only an audience’s acknowledgement makes affection real. This dynamic is eerily reminiscent of Margot’s medical condition. Unable to feel anything herself, Margot needs onlookers to tell her when she hurts. 

Margot’s condition makes for some of LaCava’s more viscerally affecting moments. Through scenes of intense body horror that would make David Cronenberg himself proud, Margot’s congenital inability to feel repeatedly comes into focus, whether she’s electrocuting herself, prodding herself with tacks, or digging her fingernails into fresh wounds. This is not a book for squeamish readers. And while some of the more violent passages can feel gratuitous, they also boldly concretize the constant violence—physical and emotional—being enacted in the novel.

Thanks in large part to such boldness, I Fear My Pain is a memorable work, both subtly ambitious and impressively compact. In less than 200 pages of precise, affectless prose, LaCava depicts one woman’s struggle to keep the poor lessons of her upbringing from becoming poor decisions in her adulthood. “My father once told me that he found coolness as an old man,” says Margot, later explaining that this coolness meant performing “full detachment” at all times, an isolating, self-destructive impulse that Margot herself says she tries to imitate. Margot struggles to fight off deeply ingrained self-destructive tendencies amplified by her medical condition immunizing her to pain. While her condition may only numb her to physical pain, she is reminded at one juncture that the “circuitry for physical and emotional pain is the same,” which means it’s possible that all of Margot’s reactions to anything are simply performances, affectations. We don’t know if Margot is learning her lesson because we never know if her feelings are genuine or simulated.

Through it all, Margot’s one saving grace is Lucy. A rare ray of light in an otherwise dark story, Lucy provides rare moments of levity and keeps I Fear My Pain from overwhelming the reader with its bleakness. “Things can be real without conflict,” Lucy reminds her friend at one particularly low moment. It’s eerily similar to her suggestion that it’s never too late to transform trauma into something positive. It’s unclear whether Margot gets the message. The reader certainly does.

+++

Stephanie LaCava is a writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Vogue, and Interview. Her debut novel, The Superrationals, was published by Semiotext(e) in 2020.

+

Michael Knapp‘s criticism has been published in The Rumpus, The Cleveland Review of Books, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere.