The Weight of One’s Lineage: On Sarah Rose Etter’s "The Book of X"
Sarah Rose Etter | The Book of X | Two Dollar Radio | 2019 | 284 Pages
No book had ever imprinted itself on my mind with a color. Not until I read Sarah Rose Etter’s debut novel The Book of X, whose predominant images imbue the story’s landscape with a red hue. There is the meat farm, which leaks blood and smells of iron; Cassie’s miscarriage, which ruins her mattress; and Cassie’s knot, a disability she was born with that renders her torso a twisted, painful, writhing creature. It is an eerie story, verging on horror without ever entering the genre in earnest, but with images that nonetheless linger like ghosts.
If I am haunted by this book, it is because of how expertly Etter sets up Cassie’s pain as she grapples with living in her body. Cassie is the third woman in the world, after her mother and grandmother, to be born with her stomach tangled into a hard, strained, stretch-marked, shining knot. In Cassie’s words, their stomachs are “twisted like thick pieces of rope with a single hitch in the center.” And though both the setting of the meat farm and Cassie’s condition lean on a surreal rendition of women’s bodies and American agriculture, the landscape Cassie must navigate rings true to life. Doctors don’t know how to heal her rare deformity, while the girls in her class move with a comfort in their bodies inaccessible to her. In this way, the novel uses Cassie’s knot to speak to real troubles Americans can face in the healthcare system, and the discomfort that comes from navigating life in a body that seems to have been born with a disdain for the feminine beauty ideal.
Cassie obsesses over the bodies of her classmates, eyeing them at their desks and analyzing the girls’ features. Her favorite body belongs to her classmate Sophia, and the two girls become fast friends when Cassie tells her: “I wish I looked like you.” In a moment of foreshadowing, Sophia says that “it’s all the same no matter how you look.” Here Sophia reveals the underlying question of the novel: is it Cassie’s knot that makes her unhappy, or does she harbor an underlying resentment towards being born a woman? It can be difficult, even traumatizing, to exist in one’s body, even for those of us born without knots for stomachs. As a teenager, I loathed getting my period each month. I hated changing my tampon at school, hated worrying about bleeding through, hated asking friends to borrow their products if I bled early. At one point, I stopped eating in an effort to gain control over my body’s internal clock. When, at just over a hundred pounds, my period dried up, I felt a quiet satisfaction at my success. I had won. I was also covered in bruises and often slept through morning classes in a friend’s car. We do not need knots to understand the resentment Cassie feels towards her body.
In an effort to help, Cassie’s mother feeds her beauty magazines and urges her to follow their mantras about seasonal trends and the latest products in nail care. Cassie reluctantly absorbs these lessons, as they make her want to rip off not only her new clothes, but also her skin, her face. It reminded me of growing up in the late 2000s, when Teen Vogue’s beauty section felt designed to provide laughable beauty tips (serious advice included: layer belts as accessories, wear fedoras and skinny neckties, and try denim skirts over leggings). But despite her trepidation, Cassie takes these beauty standards to heart:
AFTER DINNER, I CUT THE FLAT-stomached women out of my mother’s magazines.
They wear bathing suits or dresses cut in at the hip. Slicing the pages gives me peace, silver metal humming through the paper until the women are separated from their scenes.
Inside the dim light of my bedroom closet, I tape their torsos to the wall, floor to ceiling. I call them The Sophias. They are the girls a boy would like to touch.
When one of her classmates, Jared, feigns a crush on her, they kiss under a tree and he begins to tug at her knot, forcing his hands into its crevices, hurting her. He pulls her dress up to expose her knot and tells her what she feared: “you’re fucking gross. I just wanted to see it for myself.” He leaves. Cassie, enraged by her treatment, goes to the meat quarry alone at night. She claws at the walls, ripping out chunks of flesh and causing so much damage that her father suspects a wolf got in while they slept. It pleases her to imagine the power of a predator in her body.
After a couple weeks pass, Cassie lets Jared walk her home. She brings him to the quarry, where he presses his lips against hers and pushes her up against the bloody wall, soaking her back and hair. He forces his fingers in her and she cries in pain. He pushes deeper and covers her mouth. She dissociates, telling herself she doesn’t mind. When it’s over, she sits on the floor of the quarry, “wet-faced, numb, chest empty.” Perhaps the worst part is that she never stops thinking of him, and though he never comes back into her life, she continues to imagine an alternate existence with him, one in which he is gentle and kind and they have children together. One in which they are in love, and she no longer lives with her gaping otherness.
Though Cassie’s knot cannot be separated from her relationship to her surroundings, her experiences with loneliness and body dysmorphia are nonetheless felt by all sorts of women. And therein lies the power of Etter’s writing. Cassie’s relationship with Jared again reminded me of high school, when one of the guys asked a certain girl to a dance because, even though he considered her ugly, he thought she was most likely to have sex with him. Or when one of my girl friends hooked up with a freshman boy who then, in a slew of psychotic acts afterward, knocked her over in a soccer scrimmage and told her she was pathetic. Cassie’s experience with men is not unique, nor is it meant to be. There’s a quiet, creeping fear of men in this book, of the abusive power they can hold over women, and of the ways in which men manipulate women’s relationship to their bodies to establish this power.
But The Book of X rejects a simple binary of men versus women, as one of Cassie’s strongest relationships is with her father. It’s her father who allows her to work one day a week in the quarry, who calls her “a natural” when she pulls a large chunk of flesh from the wall, who transcends gender norms by even letting her participate in this masculine line of work. Instead of fretting over his daughter’s body, he jokes with her frequently and gets her to smile. When they speak before her first day of work, his laughter lights her up inside like “a thousand gold coins raining down” on her. Their relationship brings one of the few sources of joy to the novel.
This makes his death, when it comes, all the more destabilizing for Cassie. By this time she has moved to the city and is living on her own. Her mother visits after he passes — her mother, who gave her the curse of the knot and fed her an unhealthy relationship with her body, giving her rocks to suck on to lose weight, doing her makeup, forcing new dresses over her shoulders, solidifying Cassie’s hate of her skin. But the father’s death brings them together, briefly, as Cassie’s mother rolls over in bed and tells her “I do love you.” The presence of “do” reveals what their relationship lacks: trust in each other’s love. When her mother returns home, Cassie knows it was their final goodbye:
AFTER MY MOTHER LEAVES, I CANNOT stop crying. For days, my eyes well up without warning, a knowledge between my ribs: I have seen her for the last time.
● Three days after death, the enzymes that were present in the last consumed meal begin to eat the body
● Hearing is the last sense to go when we die
● Certain species of jellyfish are immortal
● Every 40 seconds, a human commits suicide
SOME DAYS I WANT A PAIN GREATER THAN my own grief: the teeth pulled from my mouth, one by one, twenty small labors, my rotted children on a silver tray, my tiny cavities.
Some days, I can hear a parade in the distance: there is joy out in the world, a celebration, confetti, cakes, laughter, not for me.
Some days, I stand on the side of the road, sobbing beneath the sunset: this is waiting for death.
Even though Cassie finally forgives her mother, in the weeks after her departure, she comes to realize that she cannot go on any longer. That any joy in the world does not belong to her, and she is only waiting for her life to end. Not long after, she lies in a hole she dug for herself, swallows a handful of white pills, and offers herself up to the “wide, bright mouth of death.”
What is most difficult to come to terms with is that Cassie commits suicide after her mother arranges for her to have experimental surgery to remove her knot. Cassie lives knotless for many years, yet she moves through life with the same listless demeanor. Cassie even grows to miss the knot post-surgery, feeling that her body has become “limp, worn, like a frayed old rope” without it. It is just as her friend Sophia prophesied when they were children. And when she gets pregnant with what ultimately results in the miscarriage that stains her mattress red, she knows her baby would have been born with a knot as well. Her surgery did not erase her deformed genes, and her progeny will bear the same burden. A man she brings home from a bar takes off her shirt to see her train-tracked torso and leaves immediately, saying those marks, whatever they are, are “fucked up.” Her scars linger as a reminder that the weight of one’s lineage cannot be erased with cosmetic surgery. Following the mantras in beauty magazines, altering appearances — it does not make a difference, not really. Internal change must occur for women to break free of outdated relationships with their bodies.
Perhaps I am grasping at straws, seeking out a positive analysis in a book that has no intention of offering such hope, but The Book of X seems to offer small clues as to how Cassie’s suicide could have been avoided — and by extension, how we may be able to save ourselves, or our friends, from succumbing to her fate. Before her death, Cassie finds solace in two places: her “Visions” and her childhood friendship with Sophia. The “Visions” serve as poetic asides in the story where Cassie dreams and daydreams in order to process the traumas of her life, but they do not transcend to a greater understanding of life or how to live it. Even in these “Visions,” Cassie’s happiness is preceded by finding someone or being loved (it is in this space that she imagines her married life with Jared). There is so much Cassie never learns about loving herself and accepting her body, and her knot imprisons her to the day of her death. Perhaps her mother’s magazines imbued her with a perverted understanding of what brings a woman happiness; perhaps if Cassie had learned how to accept her body and embrace her she-wolf power, she would not have been pushed to suicide. This is what Etter leaves us with: that we must learn to accept our bodies beyond the confines of the feminine beauty ideal.
More importantly, though, perhaps if Cassie had been honest with Sophia about her adult loneliness, she could have found salvation in their friendship. Instead, the girls grow distant over time, and Cassie finds herself keeping their phone conversations simple even when she is in the throes of depression. Comparatively, when the girls were close in high school, Sophia pushed Cassie to take risks, to be wild, to forget her knot. Their childhood relationship is a strong testament to female friendship, but it does not hold through their adult lives. Perhaps if it had, Cassie would not have been driven to suicide. Perhaps, through Sophia’s care, Cassie could have endured the discovery of not loving herself. If women’s bodies truly are a trap, perhaps the only solution is to hold fast to our splendid and complicated friendships, and to acknowledge that, for some of us, our suffering endures and may endure forever.
There is little hope offered in The Book of X. Every time I put it down I felt that I, too, had to climb out from under pounds of red dirt, gasping for breath as I reemerged in my room, calming my nerves by reminding myself that I do not live in Cassie’s story, not exactly. But even if The Book of X is not exactly the America we live in today, it leaves readers with a memorable critique of this world because of the way it blurs the lines between the real and the surreal, forcing readers to confront the sense of danger the uncanny evokes. It is for this reason that the book’s red hue is unforgettable, haunting. And it’s for this reason that each evening since reading The Book of X, when the sky has melted to a deep crimson, I have looked up and thought of Cassie’s red world, and I have hoped that, if she was never going to be happy in life, she did in fact find peace when she buried her sadness and opened herself up to the wide, bright mouth of death.