16 Pills by Carley Moore (review)

"I've always been a sharer, a teller, a blurter and a huge talker," writes New York-based poet, novelist, and professor Carley Moore in her debut essay collection, 16 Pills. She's also, we discover in the course of the book, a voracious reader, movie-watcher, dancer, and crier. Her reactions to and engagement with an assortment of articles, books, and films figure large, and you may find yourself jotting down titles. Her emotional honesty doesn't drain or pain but awakens, recalling Frost's dictum: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."

The "I" that takes us by the hand and leads us through these sixteen essays is bold, never prissily italicized or punctiliously underlined. Moore is like the best friend you had as a child who whispers a secret in your ear before racing to the jungle gym to hang by her knees, shouting for you to join her.

The writer uses her many selves—disabled child, mother, teacher, internet dater, pill-taker—as lenses through which to view and interrogate issues we wrestle with as individuals and as a society. With vulnerability and disarming humor, she takes on divorce and co-parenting; reproductive technology; the role of prescription drugs in constructing a self; America's obsession with happiness; racism; sexism; gender; the wound of being unseen; the violence of narcissism, and our own complicity. After repeatedly watching the video of Eric Garner's chokehold death, she writes: "I saw how violence becomes spectacle and felt the nausea of implication that my viewing brings with it. Each viewing is, after all, called a hit."

Ouch. At her most powerful, Moore leaves your cheek with a stinging, red handprint.

For this author, process—an essay's construction—is itself a topic. Rather than hide the ropes and pulleys, she invites us backstage, sealing the intimacy she establishes with her readers. In "The Jealousy Exams," Moore reveals, "This essay is inspired in part by Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams. Like many readers, I loved the book, which made me think about writing as an act of empathy…" Moore uses her essay and jealousy of Jamison's success as a vehicle for exploring the green-eyed monster, which she admits to having welcomed on occasion: "I made a little nest for it in my heart and for that small stretch of time, I lived in that nest. I gathered my wrongs like scraps of paper and string." Her nurturing of a reviled emotion made me think of Tony Hoagland's poem "Hate Hotel:" "I take my room at the Hate Hotel, and sit and flip/ through the heavy pages of the photographs, / the rogue's gallery of the faces I loathe."

About Jamison, Moore continues:

A young successful writer, not totally unlike me, but different, too. I imagined her flat stomach and all the donuts she could consume without any effect. I decided she had sold her book effortlessly and that she was winning. I got mad about my own publishing struggles and at the publishing in dustry in general. I calmed down. I joked with a friend that I wanted to write a book called The Jealousy Exams. I grew bored with my own jealousy. Eventually, I started to work on this essay.

Moore spins a creation myth, and we fall under its spell. Not only does she pay tribute to other essayists—past and present—she contributes to the corpus on the form with her own unique definition of the essay: an anti-palliative. While five of the sixteen essays bear the title "On______" (Unhappiness; Nitpicking and Co-Parenting; Spectacle and Silence; Eating; Portals), it's safe to say that Montaigne never conceived of the essay as anti-antidepressant! A connoisseur of pills (her first and longest-taken being a synthetic form of dopamine to treat a debilitating hereditary condition diagnosed in childhood, dopa-responsive dystonia: "I was in a perpetual state of discomfort. I could not rest or relax."), Moore recounts how the antidepressant Lexapro, which she took for anxiety, gave...