Summary
Daniel SmithâÈçs Monkey Mind is the stunning articulation of what it is like to live with anxiety. As he travels through anxietyâÈçs demonic layers, Smith defangs the disorder with great humor and evocatively expresses its self-destructive absurdities and painful internal coherence. Aaron Beck, the most influential doctor in modern psychotherapy, says that âÈêMonkey Mind does for anxiety what William StyronâÈçs Darkness Visible did for depression.âÈë Neurologist and bestselling writer Oliver Sacks says, âÈêI read Monkey Mind with admiration for its bravery and clarity. . . . I broke out into explosive laughter again and again.âÈë Here, finally, comes relief and recognition to all those who want someone to put what they feel, or what their loved ones feel, into words.
Excerpt
1.
genesis
The story begins with two women, naked, in a living room in upstate New York.
In the living room, the blinds have been drawn. The coffee table, which is stained and littered with ashtrays, empty bottles, and a tall blue bong, has been pushed against the far wall. The couch has been unfurled. It is a cheap couch, with no springs or gears or wooden endoskeleton; its cushions unfold flat onto the floor with a flat slapping sound: thwack. Also on the floor are several clear plastic bags containing dental dams, spermicidal lubricant, and latex gloves. There is everything, it seems to me, but an oxygen tank and a gurney.
I am hunched in an awkward squat behind a woman on all fours, a woman who is blond and overweight. Her buttocks are exposed and her knees are spread wideâÈ'âÈêpresenting,âÈë they call it in most mammalian species. I am sixteen years old. I have never before seen a vagina up close, an in-person vagina. My prior experience has been limited to two-dimensional vaginas, usually with creases and binding staples marring the view. To mark the occasion, I would like to shake the vaginaâÈçs hand, talk to it for a while. How do you do, vagina? Would you like some herbal tea? But the vagina is businesslike and gruff. An impatient vagina, a waiting vagina. A real bureaucrat of a vagina.
I inch closer on the tips of my toes, knees bent, hands out, fingers splayedâÈ'portrait of the writer as a young lecher. The air in the room smells like a combination of a womenâÈçs locker room and an off-track betting parlor, all smoke and sweat and scented lotions. My condom, the first IâÈçve had occasion to wear in anything other than experimental conditions, pinches and dims sensation, so that my penis feels like what I imagine a phantom limb must feel like. The second woman has brown hair done up in curls, round hips, and dark, biscuit-wide nipples. She lies on the couch, waiting. As I proceed, foot by foot, struggling to keep my erection and my balance at the same time, her eyes coax me forward. She is touching herself.
Now the target vagina is only a foot away. Now I feel like a military plane, preparing for in-air refueling. I feel, also, like a symbol. This is why I am here, ultimately. This is why, when the invitation was extended (âÈêDo you want to stay? I want you to stayâÈë), I accepted, and waited who knows how long in the dark room for them to return. How could I have said no? What I had been offered was every boyâÈçs dream. Two women. The dream.
Through a haze of cannabis and cheap beer, I bolster my courage with this: the dream. What I am about to do is not for myself. It is for my people, my tribe. Dear friends, this is not my achievement. This is your achievement. Your victory. A fulfillment of your desires. Oh poor, suffering, groin-sore boys of the eleventh grade, I hereby dedicate this vagina toâÈ'
It is then that the woman coughs. It is a rattling, hacking cough. A cough of nicotine and phlegm. And the vagina, which is connected to the coughâÈçs apparatus by some internal musculature I could not possibly have imagined before this moment, winks at me. With its wild, bushy, thorny lashes, it winks. My heart flutters. My breathing quickens. I have been winked at by a vagina that looks like Andy Rooney. I feel a tightness in my chest and I think to myself, Oh dear lord, what have I gotten myself into?
