Prologue


Yesterday, I had two men whom I could not choose between. Today, I am a single woman in her thirties, losing the trifecta without a consolation prize. Furthermore, I am anxious, autistic, chaste, claustrophobic, and frigid. I am a hypochondriac, an impulsive insomniac, a lunatic, a manic-depressive narcissist who’s neurotic and a paranoid pessimist with schizophrenic spasms. While my older girlfriends keep assuring me I will fall in love again, I have a hard time imagining that one day I will be able to sleep again with someone besides Stilnox; I observe around me my twenty-something girlfriends crossing a sentimental polar tundra for years… and I get chills.

So I decided to write, which comforts me almost as much as piercing my pimples or popping my black heads (yes, even at thirty!) while hiding in office restrooms. I must confess that this story, as romantic as it may seem, is absolutely true. My novel structure is simple. Please forgive me as I didn’t attend university to learn how to write, but to learn how to handle export letters of credit which are, by the way, the most absurd international financial instrument in existence. And now I can sell household food processors abroad.

Actually, I have always wanted to write but I never studied technique. I thought naively that to learn you have to inspire yourself from great Literature: Diderot, Proust, Nin, authors who certainly taught me to appreciate great style, but who have paralyzed me with procrastinating perfectionism. Recently, though, I had a revelation by reading some bad contemporary French novels, especially one that I must warmly thank, but whose name I will not quote (since I don’t know for now who is going to publish me, I had better be careful). While reading this book, I said to myself how terrible and lazy this writing is! I can write something at least this bad. And this is how I got unblocked.

My story starts nine months ago…



PART I

Chapter I: January


The first year of the second millennium corresponds to the year of my thirtieth birthday celebrated all over Europe on November 11. When I used to live in Germany I celebrated alone.

It is the Christmas Season and my boyfriend Trent and I are having the visit from San Francisco from Khaled, his best friend. Trent was born in Vietnam, has Danish citizenship and a Green Card. We met five years ago in Los Angeles.
I like Khaled, a tall, voluble guy of Somali origin with a lanky look. While we still lived in Los Angeles, where people can eat, go shopping, and consume twenty four hours a day, Trent studied during the day and worked at night as a waiter in a typical American diner. I would sometimes go out alone with Khaled. On the dance floor he was the stroboscope projecting his long limbs with a movement of a maniac getting freed from his straight-jacket. We had a lot of fun together.

Yes, but it has been four years since I left from the United States and have not been back nor seen Khaled since. When he finally visited us I realized how much I had drifted away from American culture when in Carrefour, a supermarket, Khaled is shocked at having to bag his own groceries and asks me if this is a cheap supermarket or how he constantly reproaches me for not being “positive”. I realized then that, as a matter of fact, like my compatriots, I spend around eighty percent of my time complaining, criticizing, and making a sour face which does not go well at all with the American philosophy of “Keep smiling”.

As a result, I have an epidermal reaction: I wake up the first of January at five o’ clock in the morning after we have partied until 3:00 A.M. for New Year’s, with, alas, a familiar itching under the nostril- the onset of the year’s first herpes crisis.

On top of being much Americanized, Khaled is a thirty-five year old hard-core single. He pours his logorrhea over me without respite; I cannot pretend I am listening to him and let my imagination wander to more inspiring spheres. His monologue is supposedly interactive and he traps me in the midst on my daydreaming; to that constraint is added the positive constraint since I am expected to answer in both optimistically and enthusiastically. As you can imagine, I am exhausted.

The most dreadful torture, however, remains: the tea ceremony. Khaled has brought along with him Somali tea – which resembles muesli more than tea. Nothing to worry about, I’m not “tea phobic” too, except I hate his tea, and to avoid hurting him I have to abandon my tea “Mariage Frère”. The preparation of Somali tea requires a minimum of twenty five minutes, to pour from one pot to the other, making a mess of all of them, to set out exactly the infusion time in the first pot, then in the second and so on; always when we are in a hurry or very hungry, or when we are waiting for the tea on Sunday to start brunching and the scent expands in my apartment more subtly than sarin gas. Our otherwise diplomatic relations whither under Trent’s helpless eye so much that Khaled shortens his visit. Of course, I still feel guilty to this day. But in good conscience, I invoke the right of self-defense because who knows what might have been the next somatic symptom after herpes?

From January on, I wake up every morning at five o’clock, my nights worsening the whole month until my sleep is interrupted every two or three hours. Thousands of thoughts ricochet in my brain during those hours lying in bed. I listen to Trent snoring next to me; I don’t know if I can’t sleep because Trent is snoring or if I can hear Trent snoring so I do not sleep. Often, in doubt and overwrought, I wake him and ask him to sleep on the couch- which he does grumbling. I try to relax and fall asleep again but the anticipative anguish of not being able to stresses me out even more and prevents me from relaxing, which prevents me from sleeping. The next morning I get up exhausted, like victim of a big hang-over. It seems inevitable that I need to “get help” and I ask a psychoanalyst friend to recommend the name of a colleague, with whom I make an appointment.

My insomnia worsens and leaving me in an alarming state of physical and psychic decrepitude. To put the cherry on the cake, one of my molars, which have undergone several surgeries, has decided to reinfect the very day of my second session with the psychotherapist. Since either the molar or the moral is dangerously inflamed, and that, all things being equal, the dentist’s intervention relieves more quickly and efficiently than the one of the psychotherapist, I accept the emergency appointment given by my dentist, half an hour before the scheduled end of my session. I go to the therapist anyway : he is half an hour late.

Finally, he makes me go into his office.
“I am sorry, but I only have five minutes, I must go in emergency to the dentist.”
“You didn’t feel like coming today?” (For him, it was avoidance, the nerve of my molar to get reinfected the day of his session.)
“Yes, yes, I really felt like it. But would it be possible to postpone the appointment to tomorrow?”
Yes, but I still had to pay for today.
Of course.

I left his office, thinking that he is definitely the type of man I can call anytime- unless I need something. He passively witnesses my path and waits for something to happen. Prescribe sleeping pills? No, he has not thought of that. I can talk to him about my insomnias, on the other hand- which is as useless as tits on a bull. I am on the edge of a nervous breakdown and I feel desperately alone.

Fact: one of the cruelest disappointments in life (and if you have done psychotherapy, you probably know what I am talking about) is to realize that your psychotherapist does not give a shit about you. Ultimately, it is better to know that you have nobody to rely on before discovering, always in the most painful moments, that you haven’t.

Therefore, after two sessions, disappointed and hurt, I decide to stop the therapy with him. But the insomnia does not stop, making me comatose during the daytime and, more seriously, provoking a disastrous moral. One evening my legs start shaking uncontrollably and I lay down. Since I have strained a muscle, I immediately impute this reaction to the anti-inflammatory I’ve been taking. In the medical guide, it is not recommended for the patients with an epileptic tendency: I wonder anxiously if I have not become, with everything else on my list of pathologies, epileptic. These spasms remind me of the panic attacks I experienced when I lived in Bavaria three years ago, and repeat several evenings in a row.
First, I stop taking medication. Then I try to identify the precursors to this new crisis, or at least, its potential triggers; I find only one common denominator: their punctuality – bedtime. Insidiously, I dread more and more this moment every day.

My relationship with Trent continues to erode; the torture of his snoring leaves me exhausted. Trent shows little compassion and is keenly annoyed by his banishment to the living room couch. It does not disturb us in our sexual activities, since, for a little while, I am prone to get a urinary tract infection exactly twenty four hours - as precisely as a Swiss clock- after sexual intercourse and my hypochondriac apprehension finally killed the desire.

I feel helpless to solve these tangled symptoms alone and desperately I gamble on the yellow pages. I choose a psychiatrist who speaks English, with the after-thought to also undergo a couple therapy. My resentment of Trent’s snoring is the tip of the iceberg of our relationship’s malaise.

Ultimately, also in Germany, I found my psychotherapist by chance. I had started psychotherapy because I was infatuated with the dentist who had done the surgery on my molar. Of course he spoke French, he was a musician (a drummer), a ski professional, and above all, he was very caring with me. Since the healing of my molar needed a good number of appointments I had to see him once a week, and eventually, I became obsessed with this man. I already lived with Trent by then and I was lucid enough to understand that this type of passion that I regularly experienced before meeting Trent, was only a palliative concealing my emptiness. This emptiness; I felt it in me for a very long time. During separate periods of my life, I tried to fill it with food, or alcohol, or sleep, but nothing would do. Trent had a quite strict conception of a couple and had warned me from the beginning of our relationship that if I cheated on him once, he would leave me. Theoretically, I agreed. I cared for him and it was suffocating not to be able to free myself of this heavy secret to my favorite confidant. I had decided, close to suicide, to start psychotherapy. I called at least ten different places: psychological help centers, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts…. One of them, a woman, in the closest town told me: “Oh, I am overbooked right now, but if you want, I can put you on the waiting list.” Repressing my tears, I asked her for the address of a colleague. She answered “Look in the yellow pages.” However there were no yellow pages for this hole- too small. If I had a gun at that very moment I would certainly have killed myself. In the midst of my despair I was not insensitive to the situation’s ironic humor: it was like I was having a heart attack and being carted from hospital to hospital to find a bed!

Finally, I remembered having seen a few months before while passing by in my tiny mountain village of eight thousand souls, the nameplate of a psychotherapist. I remembered thinking at the time amused: “What do people talk to him about? About their cow that has trouble casting down?” I had left from work earlier than usual, on the edge of collapse, and I rang at his door. He had received me immediately, listened to me and diagnosed a quite serious depression since I was fifteen years old. He made me promise not to commit suicide before the next session. He belonged to the movement of the cognitive behaviorists. We had started psychotherapy which lasted for six months and it did me good.

(The behaviorist theory consists in not necessarily looking for the reasons for the patient’s behavior buried deeply in their personal history and subconscious – often from early childhood- but to observe their behavior and unravel the bad habits by teaching good habits.)

I believe that he may have saved my life. I am sure of it.





Chapter 2: Touching Base


I call the psychiatrist from the yellow pages and his secretary answers. I ask her if the psychiatrist is a behaviorist and if he speaks English. She replys that she is not the personal secretary of Doctor Mathisse but that I can leave my name and phone number and he will call me back. Reluctantly I leave them, since he too, presumably, belongs to that subspecies of man: I- can-contact-him-anytime-unless-I-need-something. He won’t call.

I forget about him right away, but postpone calling any of the other phone numbers. What a surprise, then, to find a message on my answering machine the next evening. First hesitation followed by silence after the beep:
“This is Doctor Mathisse. You can call me back tomorrow morning after ten o’clock. The secretary will transfer you to the hospital and we can speak confidentially… I have a lot of bilingual patients like you.”
The next morning, a Friday, before work, around nine o’clock, I call his office and leave both my cellular phone number and the number at work.

Monday, at the end of the afternoon, at work, I answer the phone:
“Roger SA, good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon, I would like to speak to Sophie Taam.”
“This is Sophie Taam.”
“This is Doctor Mathisse.”

I smile and think, “Well, finally, we made it!” I can hear him, at the other end, smiling. I am sure you have read the last sentence wondering if I don’t have, on top of all my other neuroses, a pathological confusion of the senses. When I used to work in the United States for the customer service of a big company, during a phone training session, we had been hammered about how important it was to smile on the phone because the interlocutor can hear it. I always thought the trainers were maniacally obsessed with the “Keep Smiling” law, even in unjustified circumstances. Seven year later, at this very moment, I realize they were right.
“You want a short therapy. Before, I used to do traditional psychoanalysis, but now, especially for young people like you, I prefer shorter therapies.”
“Do you mind if we speak English? I don’t want anyone in my office to understand what I am saying.”

We continue in English. I describe my shaking, I talk about my spasms, my spasmophilia, (a word that I had forgotten since my high-school crises) when I wanted to impress the economics teacher I used to fantasize about. I only made this connection afterward, of course, when I noticed that this instructor represented my ideal man: a charismatic one from whom I tried to get attention by studying the economy with passion and success. My spasmophilia crises would always start during his classes, we had to stop the session while I breathed into a plastic bag. Those crises stopped miraculously after I graduated from high school.

I recall my behaviorist therapy in Germany. I ask him what kind of therapy he does – face to face, a dialog, if he is registered (yes), how much his fees (forty dollars for a specialist visit, plus twenty five dollars for personal participation. On top of the forty dollars? Yes. Gloups.) After exceptional derogation, my psychotherapy in Germany had been entirely reimbursed by the German social security, toward which I am thoroughly thankful. My latest psychotherapist was inefficient but inexpensive. (twenty dollars reimbursed by the insurance and a ten dollar personal “symbolic” contribution).
“Come, we will talk about it. I have an opening next Thursday evening.”
“I am sorry, I can any evening except Thursday.”
“So see you next Monday, at seven thirty p.m. I know it’s a bit late, but…”
“No, it’s perfect. See you next Monday.”




Chapter 3: Revelation


This week, the spasmophilia crises (epilepsy?) multiply. When I lay down I can feel with horror my legs contract then shake as if this part of my body has entirely escaped from my brain’s control. I can not sleep more than two or three hours in a row, I wake up always around 4:40 or 5:00 A.M. and I can not fall back to sleep. I am exhausted and depressed.

On Monday night, I go to the psychiatrist.
Psychiatrist- this name impresses me. He is not just a psychotherapist like in Germany. It feels like with only one look he is going to go through my psyche and read it like an open book, thanks to all his medical and psychiatric knowledge. He also has the power to give me anti-depressive medication. I only hope he is not going to right away. The last psychotherapist, after only two sessions, prescribed this miracle solution for my psychic suffering. I had always been against it, but with the exhaustion, my resistance could fail.

I ring downstairs at “Doctor Mathisse”. The door automatically opens. The elevator is out of order, so I climb up the eight floors and arrive at his front door, red and out of breath. I ring the bell and wait a few seconds. The door opens and, a young woman leaves and a man takes me down a long corridor with white walls and white doors. Is he the psychiatrist? He does not look like what I expected of a psychiatrist. He is too short and dressed quite casually. He does not look like anything. Maybe he is the secretary? I look away, embarrassed for no reason.
“I will be right with you.”
A woman seated on the bench in the corridor gets up and follows him to one of the white doors. I sit on the other end of the wooden bench close to the old heater with gargling pipes. Women’s magazines are spread on the table near by. It is warm and I am a bit early, 7:20 P.M. I can hear a feminine voice faintly through the door, unintelligible, and a masculine voice intervening once in a while, but only briefly. Time passes slowly but it is past seven thirty. I get a claustrophobic uneasiness waiting in this narrow corridor with so many white doors close. Soon I need to pee.

I get up and wander down the hallway looking for the restroom. I do not find any. I am about to open a few doors randomly, but change my mind and go back to the bench. The entrance door rings and opens by itself. A third woman, young and slim, woman enters. I squeeze my purse against me to leave her some room on the bench.
‘Don’t worry about it,” she says smiling. “I sit all day. What time is your appointment?”
“Seven thirty, and you?”
“Mine too.”
Well, a psychiatrist certainly is allowed to make mistakes, but this revelation only increases my uneasiness. So I ask her:
“Is this your first time here?”
“No, no. He probably forgot to reschedule my appointment”, she answers serenely. “And you? Is this your first time?”
“Yes. Before, I went to another one, but I didn’t like him.”
“Here in Mesnieux?”
“Yes. But, you know, this is very subjective,” I reply.
“This therapist was recommended to me by the psychiatrist who prescribes my medication. Too bad the other one is about to retire and doesn’t want any new patients. He is really great. But this one is good too. He doesn’t treat you like a doctor, he doesn’t take himself so seriously. I feel comfortable with him.”
“You take medication?”
“Yes.”
I have always been terrified by anti-depressants and other psychiatric medications. I saw their effect on my friend Ann: addiction, weight gain, and inefficiency. And they did not cure her depression. I look at this young woman with compassion. Her case must be serious. What does she have? I wish she would tell me about her disease.
“Do you know where the toilets are?”
“No, and I need to go.”
Like I have done before, she wanders through the corridor and inspects all the closed doors.
“We will ask the doctor,” she finally announces. The silence is broken only by the gargling pipes. We both read magazines. The wait get heavier and heavier. Finally, the office door opens and a short man walks his patient to the entrance door wishing her a good evening.
The young woman with me asks, “Where are the toilets?”
He looks as if cornered by a pack of wolves when he answers ashamedly that there are none. The young woman jokes, “A psychiatrist has a brain but no bladder.”
Just outside his office door he asks, “Who wants to start?”
The young woman, always smiling, turns to me and says, “Go ahead.”
“Thank you.” I could not have waited another minute.

I enter a blindingly white room with a psychoanalyst couch on the right and, to my relief, a picture window onto the street lights. I instantly feel better. I sit down on the white leather chair and put my purse and my coat on the second white leather chair to my left. He takes a seat across his glass desk, his back to the window, in a large white chair.
I look him straight in the eye for the first time.
‘Are you English?’ he asks.
“No.”
“Half?”
“No, but I lived in Los Angeles for five years.
“Have you been back to France for a while?”
I am surprised by his questions. Is it curiosity or is it to explain our phone conversation in English?
“I left the United States four years ago but I live with an American.”
“And is it going well between you?” he asks me in a pressing tone of voice.
The question appears a bit incongruous and premature but I don’t think dwell on it. My priority, for the time being, is to overcome those spasms and insomnia, and the relationship with Trent seems secondary.
“Actually, he is not American, he is Vietnamese with Danish citizenship. We met in Los Angeles and he followed me to Germany, then to France.” Yes, I conclude, it is going well.
“Ok, tell me about your symptoms. Describe them to me exactly; it could be many different things.”
He take notes while I tell him about my anxiety attacks in Entalzheim last winter, about my Bavarian experience, about my claustrophobic feeling over there.
“But Munich is a beautiful city though,” he retorts.
He knows Munich! What a coincidence! I feel like asking him about his experiences but, instinctively, do not. After all, he is a psychiatrist, who might become my psychotherapist. He is not an anonymous traveler met wandering with whom I am happy to share travel impressions and whose mutual experience of a foreign place creates comradely.
“Yes, Munich is a beautiful city, but I used to live an hour’s drive away and roads are bad, especially in the winter time.”
“That is true. There is a certain sense of claustrophobia in the region surrounded by high mountains.”
He knows the Entalzheim region! And he validates my closed in feeling, that I considered pathological, in a universal way. Still, a small voice silently orders me not to ask him personal questions.
I have told him on the phone how the word “spasmophilia” describes my crises when I was sixteen years old. At the time, I had to choose a school orientation and I had opposed to my father. I wanted to take a literary path; I was forever inclined to literature and languages, and my father absolutely wanted me to study at a good business school in order to assure me of a brilliant and comfortable future.
“How old are you now?”
“Thirty,” I say very directly.
A surprised look comes over his face, as if he was going to say something, but he does not. (All doctors, when they hear my age, tell me I look younger.)
I tell him about my literary “calling”. At eight years old I started to write: poems, stories, and a diary. At fourteen, while studying Victor Hugo in French literature class, I was struck by the divine revelation which foretold his writer destiny. I felt right then touched by a similar revelation. At fifteen I met Bruno, a young man my age and my first love. He wrote brilliantly and my talent, back then, seemed ridiculous compared to his. That experience was my first discouragement against my calling. The second one was, at seventeen, the absolute paternal veto against a literary career and the forced orientation toward commercial studies. At eighteen, I formally gave up my writer calling. Officially, because I declared in writing in my diary:
“21.08.89: it is possible that one of the biggest failures of my life, let’s say the first one, started with my renouncement of literature. I do not feel a gift for it, and anyway, I will not fight, I will resign myself to a mediocre destiny. […] Now, I can feel it and it is too late. I have missed one destiny and have chosen another.”

In the United States and in Germany I started to write again periodically. Meanwhile, after the first few years of learning and the intellectual challenge of working in export in English for an American company, then in German in a German company, I began to feel more and more out of phase with my work. After fifteen years of silence, I got in touch with Bruno again- with emotion. I had showed him some of my writing, which he loved. Thanks to this first support, I decided to start writing more consistently. The idea of writing as a calling was brought up to me by Benjamin, a friend, who, after graduating from the same business school, entered the seminary to become a priest. Although we were very different in our behavior and our beliefs- he is very chaste and I rather libertine, he chose to confide in me during his exodus.

“What do you write?”
The question astonishes me. The psychotherapist in Germany had always treated the question of writing with casualness and the first one I saw in Nice, for only two only sessions, never went into details.
“Short stories, a diary, poems, especially autobiographical things. But I don’t write much at the moment.”
“What are your major themes? Each writer has its specific themes.”
This remark indicates a personal interest for literature and bonds us like a common knowledge of Entalzheim .
“Well, they would be my writer calling, my condition as a woman, and my relationship with my father.”

The dialog goes on. I remain a bit reserved, like I always am with people I do not know.
“My crises, doctor. Are they epilepsy?” I finally venture anxiously.
“Do you lose conscious afterward?”
“No.”
“Incontinence?”
“No”.
“Do you bite your tongue during the crises?”
“No.”
“Then it is not epilepsy. When there are upsets in life’s path sometimes the body betrays us. Psychotherapy is precisely life’s writing. I am interested in your story. But tell me,” he asks looking up from his notes, “Sophie, do you feel good toward me? There must be a good connection between the psychotherapist and his patient.”
“Yes, I feel at ease with you.”
I am surprised that he uses my first name. In Germany, the psychotherapist used to call me “Frau Taam” and only used “Sophie” in the third person when he would refer to my Self or the child I have been. My first name from his mouth appears friendly to me like the common knowledge of the Entalzheim region or an interest in literature.
“OK, I know you want a short therapy, but psychotherapy does not always work with a few sessions,” he states firmly.
“I understand. I am willing to go on for a while, and even if one day I manage to be published, I think therapy will be able to…” I look for the right word, “help me.”
“Fine. Then I will register you for next week, and I apologize, you will not have to wait as long.”
“Can I take a Stillnox when I have those crises?”
“You might stay wasted afterward.”
“But they happen at night. I had a problem with my boyfriend and maybe it was because I was upset.”
“Sorry, I did not pay close enough attention. Yes, you can take Stillnox. Tell me about this problem next time.”
He ceased taking notes for some time. The session does not finish abruptly like with the former psychotherapist, leaving me frustrated, but very softly. I thank him for calling me back. As he is following me to the door of his office, he says:
“You are welcome, I am glad I called you back.”
This remark surprises me. I noticed the “I am interested in your story”, and I ask myself if he throws his patients out when he is not interested anymore. This remark, as well as his last sentence, leads me to assume that the psychiatrist can take pleasure with a subject. Unlike for my previous therapies where I was a mere remunerated work whose object does not matter, now I feel like a relational exchange where each one enriches itself. This concept is new to me because with my two former psychotherapists, the tacit and ever-present rule made me the subject of the work and erased my interlocutor as a subject transforming him into a mirror, or a revealer – photographic.
This feels confusing but I cannot see the psychiatrist. I have my back turned to him and before I can react we arrive to his office door, which he opens to let me out.
I walk past the young woman seated on the bench who smiles at me courteously. He opens his entrance office for me and wishes me a good evening.

That week I still sleep very badly. Since my childhood, I have always secretly imagined a man whose gaze on me would transform me into a novel heroine. Sometimes, I would imagine it as a camera and would take myself the actress playing her role. At other times, in mystic surges, as a God observing me permanently, I would talk to him in my head even though I felt this behavior as abnormal and dangerous. At fifteen years old, I fell in love for the first time, without my knowing it, as I liked to describe it afterward. That means I bonded myself with compassion and friendship to Bruno: a young teenager intellectually brilliant, romantic, rebellious and tortured, who looked me alike on all levels- except very ugly. He was in love with me and I had finally recognized in him the look of one who had accompanied me throughout my childhood, of one who would know me in the darkest inner-most depths of my soul, of one who loved me unconditionally and who would reveal me to myself. Like the puppeteer with his puppet, he put life into me. I wanted to keep this look at any price, and when, after six months, he gave me an ultimatum- either I accepted to love him physically or he would not see me any more- I finally realized that I too felt in love, without me knowing it. I had never known the loving feeling before and I was forced to acknowledge it as such a posteriori.

Now, very naturally, this fantastic man embodies himself into my new psychiatrist, to whom I open myself entirely and without restraint. On Sunday, amongst the crowd, I secretly hope to meet him by chance: what does a psychiatrist do on Sunday? At nights, imaginary sessions with him keep me awake. In the daytime, I daydream standing up, and those thoughts are stronger than reality. I cannot listen to Trent, sometimes even his words annoy me forcing me out of my inner world. When he is in the same room as I am, I do not feel at ease. I can’t write. We don’t have space in our apartment for a separate office so when Trent is at home I go to a café, always the same one, to write quietly- but not without silently cursing his presence. After those writing sessions at the café, I always close my notebook abruptly and go to pay at the counter, like a guy running away from a one night stand.
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