Jeanie shakes her head and says Kittentits, you are so totally busted. You are so totally broken. It’s all over you, she says. Think about it, she goes. You floated in her nine months which in baby-time is forever. The beat of her heart was the first sound you heard. She was the universe you soaked in and the one you clawed out of and you lost her so early it formed you completely, so completely it’s invisible because it’s all you’ve ever known. But I can see it, Crotchtard.
I am a fan of the transgressive, trash-talking female trend in recent novels — it can be cathartic to read about women loosening their girdles and refusing to act ladylike — and while it might be off-putting to see a ten-year-old curse and fling around words like “tard” and “lesbo” like Molly in Kittentits, when you come to understand that her antisocial behaviour is guarding a crushed and neglected heart, it’s the distance the reader has to travel between unlikeability and understanding that makes this a special and worthwhile journey. Layer on some surreal and absurdist elements — this is a novel with ghosts and miracles, puppets and wax dummies, a psychic cowgirl in an iron lung and feuding conjoined twins — and I can see how this wouldn’t be for everyone; but it was for me. I am a fan of just this sort of thing: interesting, out-of-the-box storytelling that reveals something true and relatable about being human; I was surprised and intrigued on every page and ultimately moved; I am delighted to have had this introduction to the work of Holly Wilson. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The day Jeanie comes old fat Evelyn comes in, says No sass talk today, Molly, this is what you’re wearing. Meaning these side-striped shorts, this puff-painted shirt she puff-painted. Spongy letters floating across my nips saying Welcome, Welcome. Yellow puff bees buzzing around the letters, my nips. All this for Jeanie, the first Resident Friend since the fire, our first Resident Correctional Friend ever at the fire-rotted, nunhaunted House of Friends: a Semi-Cooperative Living Community of Peace Faith(s) in Action. I’d like to barf oceans on this shirt. I’d like to make some whiny kid put it on then barf on it while Jeanie watched and the whiny kid cried. That’s how you welcome someone the day she gets out of prison. That’s how you make her feel at home in her new halfway house where for eighteen months the state of Illinois requires her to live.
As a baby, Molly Sibly lost her mother in a drunk-driving accident; and due to her father’s unending grief, she effectively lost him in that moment as well. Raised in a Quaker “House of Friends”, and home-schooled by a well-meaning but clueless fellow resident (Evelyn, who is dealing with her own loss from a recent tragedy), Molly is restless and lonely with one real life friend, a pen pal who never responds, and a nodding relationship with the Goth librarian who sets up the TV/VCR combo in the library’s media room so she can watch an old video of her mother’s college performance as Nina in The Seagull. When Jeanie — a twenty-three-year-old dirt-bike-riding ex-con — is sent to live at the House of Friends, the fact that she immediately nicknames Molly “Kittentits”, shares smokes with her, and enlists the girl’s help in some dangerous capers, will make Molly feel seen and valued as an equal. And when Molly realises that what links all of her friends together is the tragic loss of their mothers, she conceives of a plan to hold a séance (or necromanteion) at the upcoming Chicago’s World Fair (a phantasmagoric version of an event once planned for 1992, but which was never actually held in real life).
There are many weird and absurdist details in Kittentits (which may not be to every reader’s tastes), and while the extreme language used by both Jeanie and Molly could admittedly turn a reader off, there is an intriguing scene in which Molly explains how encountering foul-language graffiti when she was seven was electrifying, “a baptism, an inauguration, a legit holy gift,” explaining:
This is how I learned what’s what. How to be a little girl in the world and be seen and heard. To live a life of glory that dignifies your suffering. It’s all about talking, it’s about how you speak. If you want to be badass and powerful you have to know the right way to speak. I wasn’t born knowing and neither were you. I had to learn and it wasn’t gradual, it was all the sudden. A lightning strike, a thunderclap, a slap on the cheek.
And I do find something intriguingly feminist in that — the loosening of the girdle and demanding to be seen and heard at a time when Molly’s only remaining parent was literally blind to her and her needs — and it was interesting that every time Molly drops an f-bomb in casual conversation, the adults around her sigh and say, “You shouldn’t talk like that,” but no one is actually engaging with her, let alone parenting the girl. At least Jeanie (horrible role-model with dubious intentions) is speaking the same language, and this sets Molly on the raucous path to find her mother and herself.
I’m the ghost-friended badass who snuck into Mombie’s dressing room, I’m a preteen hellion who emits her own scent: the awesome stink of a girl who bites, the blood-muddied funk of the bramble cats! In Grandpa Hack’s Horror Mirrors each mirror shows you killed a different way, but no matter the mirror, no matter the wound, no matter stabbed all over, tractor-crushed, or drowned, I look wild and dirty always, a dirt bike gang’s kitten. Someone waiting to sink rabies into the steak of your neck.
I thoroughly enjoyed the writing and the journey; thanks to goodreads friend Stephanie for putting this on my radar!
