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FICTION
Everyone and Everything
Nadine J. Cohen
Pantera Press, $32.99
At the beginning of Nadine J. Cohen’s debut novel we are in a psychiatrist’s office with three women: Liora, a concerned sister; Priya, a concerned doctor, and Yael, the main character. Sister and doctor are deciding the next step for our balletic, wounded heroine – she has recently tried to take her own life, and the options on the table are bleak: private rehab where she will be forced to go off her meds, or stay with sister’s family, which includes three young children and a reasonably non-problematic brother-in-law.
Neither option delivers the promise of Yael’s greatest desire – to never again see another human being.
Nadine J. Cohen’s character Yael is clever and unusual – and she knows it.Credit:
Sound like another sad girl novel? Well, sure, it slides neatly into the genre – yet what distinguishes Cohen’s book from the rest is the charismatic vocals of its disputatious heroine.
“I always imagined breakdowns as epic, seizure-like episodes with screaming, convulsing, maybe some light mouth-frothing.” Yael pictured drama, violence – The Exorcist; in comparison, her “sluggish descent seems woefully anti-climactic”. She is bedridden, wired and nauseous; a formal diagnosis of anxiety attacks suddenly makes her feel “all romantic … like Virginia Woolf, or a Victorian-era painting … like she’s in a Lars von Trier film”.
Cohen cleverly traces Yael’s journey towards healing and self-awakening through tactful exposition. Information and observations are breadcrumbed in short, incisive scenes.
Alone, she experiences blackout buys, acquiring random useless items while half-conscious. She dulls her brain by watching YouTubes of pimple-popping, cyst excisions, earwax removal, and blackhead extraction content.
She manages to get out the door by organising her life around daily visits to the Coogee women’s baths, therapy sessions, the mandatory check-in with her sister, and keeping in touch with her best friend, whose friendship has been demoted into a textlationship.
Yael’s buoyant, verbal dexterity is what makes you keep reading. She’s clever and unusual and she knows it, but she’s not rubbing it in your face.
As Yael attempts to renegotiate the terms of her (unexpected) life in quietude, certain memories prod her still-tender existentialism: the death of her parents in her early adulthood; her unbidden reliance on mood-altering medication; the departure of a f---boy whom she secretly loved.