Take This Longing
Heather Lewis as psychoanalytic education
Emily Schlesinger
In 2007, I was a social work intern at a psychoanalytically oriented trauma clinic. I was sure I was cut out to be a trauma therapist, but my supervisor clearly had her doubts. As I began to encounter patients, all the theory I read came up short. Ideas about disorganized attachment, projective identification, and the avoidance aspect of PTSD did nothing to help me cope with my experience of having to wait for a patient I felt I’d made a good connection with in a previous session. Would she be ten, twenty, thirty minutes late? Or would she not show up at all? The not-knowing was torture. I would sit and wait, awash in my earliest experiences of abandonment and out-of-control longing. (I didn’t yet have a smartphone.)
I had a patient I’ll call J who had been abused as a child in multiple foster homes. Any time we made any kind of emotional contact, she’d no-show and disappear for weeks. Sometimes when she finally did appear, she’d be drunk or high. Then I would find myself feeling intoxicated in her presence. I could feel the temperature change, or sometimes, as I called it, the room turning upside down. It was impossible to think, and language became useless.
In retrospect, it seems highly unfortunate that J was stuck with me as a therapist, a fragile twenty-six-year-old white woman. I was in my first year of personal analysis, and J needed someone who could do what I could not yet do: maintain the capacity to think in her presence, and metabolize, mentally, all the feelings she couldn’t handle.
My supervisor kept trying to use an analogy from The Little Prince, about a fox who can only come so close, who assesses safety from a distance and, as trust is built, will get a little closer each day. This made sense to me in some abstract way, but what did it mean to be a person who was a fox? I couldn’t understand what it felt like to be J. Didn’t it feel good to talk to a therapist? I loved talking about myself to someone who wanted to listen, as much as I loved being the person that someone wanted to tell everything to.
“I think J might be a lesbian,” I told my supervisor. “I read in her chart that she drank bleach after getting into a relationship with another woman at her shelter. She said she was trying to make herself pure. One of her foster home abusers was a pastor—I don’t know if religion has anything to do with the shame. But it’s awful that she learned to hate herself like that.”
My supervisor looked at me like she often did, like I didn’t know anything. “I don’t think people like J, who have this much abuse from this early on, really develop a sexuality. I would say J is more pre-sexual.”
I had thought it might be significant that J, a Black woman, drank bleach out of internalized homophobic shame, or perhaps heartbreak. But I was supposed to just keep thinking of her as a fox—to not think about sexuality and the ways it makes trauma that much more complex, to not think about the intersection of race and queerness and shame.
Then I found House Rules.
House Rules is the first of Heather Lewis’s novels. Lewis wrote three novels before dying by suicide in 2002 at the age of 40. House Rules is the story of Lee, a fifteen-year-old incest survivor who escapes into a world of champion showjumping where young riders are doped with the same synthetic opiates as the horses. The adults supposedly in charge draw Lee into the same torturous triangles of seduction and violation that she left back home.
As Melissa Febos puts it in her introduction to the new edition of Notice—Lewis’s second novel, one deemed too disturbing by editors in her lifetime, and out of print for years, until now—“the sex in House Rules is copious, violent, and arousing.” She couldn’t look away and neither could I.
Ψ
Lewis’s prose shows you what happens if you strip the world of all its detail except the heat given off by certain people, the ones who have the power to give you everything, meaning the power to destroy you by taking it all away. What Lewis shows is the way the sensorium of someone like her (here I’m trying to work around the words trauma and survivor) has transmuted into something that operates on another wavelength; it’s not about the five senses but what another human’s proximity can do to your skin, your guts, your sex organs.
Allan Gurganus, Lewis’s mentor from Sarah Lawrence, calls it her “relentless physical registration.” It can be relentless, and dizzying, to navigate a world with so few physical markers: for the most part, we don’t know what Lewis’s characters look like, or what they wear or eat. There is more void than content, and in that void there is infinite space for the unbearable longing for the touch of a person who just might be the end of you. In Lewis’s books, sometimes this threat of annihilation is symbolic; sometimes it’s literal.
I remember a clinic meeting where we were discussing some piece of writing—maybe Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery—and I told the group I’d found a book that I thought conveyed the unique perceptive experience of survivors of childhood sexual violation.
“It’s actually—well, it’s kind of lesbian S&M erotica,” I said.
My supervisor shifted in her chair. “Well maybe if there’s an appropriate passage, you could Xerox it and bring it in.” She had the dead and bewildered gaze she seemed to reserve just for me, which always triggered in me intense shame and a certainty that I would never make it as a clinician.
It was implicit that you weren’t supposed to speak about sadomasochistic erotica in clinical group supervision within the state’s Office of Mental Health, but I wasn’t good at picking up on such cues. In retrospect I can see that the discomfort around all this was a form of what psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou, in her book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, and Traumatophilia, coins as traumatophobia, as opposed to what she calls traumatophilia, and what drew me to Lewis’s novels is that they are traumatophilic texts.
Lewis’s work is traumatophilic in that the traumatized subject retains her status as subject, maintains a relationship to sexuality and her body that is her own. This goes against the more pathologizing approaches to trauma, which often deny both infantile sexuality and the pleasures—the passion, tenderness, even joy—that can enrich and complicate even the deadliest compulsions to repeat. Traumatophobia was at the root of the need to reduce J to a desexualized, dehumanized fox, and the horror at bringing erotica and the potential for arousal, especially of the sadomasochistic variety, into the trauma meeting. The trauma victim isn’t supposed to experience pleasure, or be alive in her body in ways that the rest of us might even envy.
It wasn’t only that House Rules helped me understand J; it helped me understand how I was like J, how J might experience a distilled version of something I knew all too well: the awful thing I had to confront every time she left me waiting. For me, Lewis is part of a fellowship of addict writers who figured out how to make language a drug: Kate Braverman, Denis Johnson, Lucia Berlin, and Edward St. Aubyn are others. I used Lewis’s work like a drug. It kept me company while I waited for J, and also became an obsession in its own right, a refuge I retreated into when I myself needed to avoid connection with other people.
“In these works, however, we get to live in the trauma in a way that is good practice for what our patients most need from us: that we join them in their worlds and be in no rush to make it all better.”
My fixation with Lewis’s work had a similar quality to Saketopoulou’s obsessive engagement with Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, which she explicates in Sexuality Beyond Consent. Reading it, I was struck by the sense that Saketopoulou was taking part in a particular kind of love affair psychoanalysts get to have with traumatophilic works of art. Not only because we can’t have affairs with our patients, but because in the consulting room, when we are confronted with massive trauma—which is, in my experience at least, much of the time not nearly as sexy as Lewis, Harris, or Saketopoulou would have you think—and compelled to labor over it, we can’t help but be a little bit traumatophobic ourselves. Anyone not afraid would have to be dissociated.
In these works, however, we get to live in the trauma in a way that is good practice for what our patients most need from us: that we join them in their worlds and be in no rush to make it all better.
Ψ
I read Notice shortly after House Rules. I had graduated from social work school and was in the process of applying for psychoanalytic training. I told myself I wanted the most rigorous training available to MSWs, but it’s not like I’d ever been much good at homework. I was attracted to the prestige of the “classical” New York City institutes that granted membership to the International Psychoanalytic Association, founded by Freud in 1910. I found Freud’s obsessional writing style as unbearable as reading emails from my father. And yet I wanted nothing more than to join Freud’s club.
It was my analyst’s club as well. I applied to the institute where she was a member, which was at the time largely run by women LCSWs and psychologists and thus seemed outside of the oppressive patriarchy of truly old-school New York institutes ruled by mostly male MDs—the notorious domain of Janet Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
My first admissions interview was in the Madison Avenue office of an exceedingly poised, bespectacled analyst with a piercing gaze who, in what I am sure is my unreliable memory, was perched on the edge of a giant rattan egg chair wearing pointe ballet shoes. I nervously barreled through a lengthy case presentation, under the impression that she was most interested in hearing about my clinical work. She called the next day and said I needed to come back. It turned out that what these professional training interviews were really about was your personal life.
I don’t remember the details of the follow-up interview but the sensation that I was the one in the pointe shoes stayed with me: being forced to dance to prove I could be vulnerable and reflective and yet boundaried. I had worn some kind of office attire to the first meeting, but for the second I chose a sleeveless dress that showed my tattoo—my own name in cursive. As unsafe as I felt, I sensed that the way to succeed was to show this woman my skin. There was a high to how good at this I was. After the high, utter sadness.
My second interviewer was an “earthier” West End Avenue shrink. She sat back in the ubiquitous Ekornes recliner, tilted her head in a display of warmth and innocence, and asked me: “What’s the most wild, out-of-control thing you’ve ever done?”
Did she know the cruelty of her question? The despair and shame that would accompany my feeling that there must be some people who could answer it honestly and still gain admission? (As though there is even an answer to that question.) Where did both of these women earn their sense of entitlement to my insides?
I experienced these meetings as so excruciating that I brought my copy of Notice to my analyst and asked her to read its brutal final rape scene as a means of conveying my experience, including the passage where the narrator realizes that her love affair with her therapist has been an awful betrayal. I don’t believe she and I ever sufficiently analyzed this association. Like the narrator of the novel, who is irresistibly drawn to an all-too-familiar sadomasochistic family home, I accepted admission at the very place that had triggered such a response.
Notice is narrated by a teenage girl slightly older than Lee, and is a feat of what could be called the opposite of worldbuilding. Notice’s heroine doesn’t give us her name, aside from the one she uses with tricks (Nina); she is an incest survivor whose family is gone; an addict for whom drugs are mostly in the rearview, out of reach, or the wrong ones; a sex worker who lives in shame over the fact that she ends up doing the worst of her labor unpaid.
Early in the novel, she gets entangled with a sadist and his wife, Ingrid, who by turns use her to recreate scenes of the brutal molestation that killed their daughter, enacting a whole familial emotional atmosphere of terror, dissociation, and fits of unbearable tenderness that is always a precursor to abandonment.
“The void is the cost.”
Lewis’s work offers an answer to the question: what becomes of the child whose own bed is the site of a devastating primal scene, who is violated in equally devastating ways by both parents? She operates in a vacuum, devoid of the triangular space we associate with Oedipal “achievement.” She is everyone’s endpoint or target or, from a Bionian perspective, container: the perverse reversal in which the child becomes the receptacle when the parents are unable to provide the containing function.
Allan Gurganus notes that “from the start Heather’s truest subject was the void.” He also states that the novel’s “truest subject is the cost of early sexual violation.” The void is the cost.
Lewis’s second published novel was a detective thriller called The Second Suspect. It was the last she wrote—apparently an attempt at a more marketable and distanced version of Notice. Its title points to the reality most trauma psychoanalysts learn: it’s not always the first perpetrator, in Notice’s case, the sadist husband and father, who is the most deadly. What can be experienced as most murderous is the betrayal from the caretaker who’s also capable of the deepest tenderness, who seems poised to protect you and then fails, who, after tantalizing seduction, inevitably falls back into helpless complicity with the father.
In both The Second Suspect and Notice, the “second suspect” is named Ingrid. We see that Ingrid is a victim too, but in Lewis’s world the tragic distinction between the daughter and the mother is that the mother will abandon the child to save herself, and the child—beholden to an inexorable morality, and love—is the one willing to put her life on the line in order to save, and remain connected to, the mother.
This is the drama that unfolds in Notice between Ingrid and “Nina.” As the two are left alone in the house, they go grocery shopping together, the narrator in the dead daughter’s clothes, and become lovers in the all-encompassing, polymorphous way that women do in Lewis’s work. With men, the repetition varies in terms of the degree of sadism and power over the narrator, who, to her great shame and yet also a kind of pride—her body’s stubborn refusal to identify as victim—is aroused by these encounters, and has a need for them. But it’s in the erotic scenes between women that we see repetition and overwhelm give way to something more, something potentially generative and new.
With Ingrid, the “something new” might be more of a fantasy: Ingrid seduces with the false promise that she might fulfill the ultimate wish, that the narrator has been special enough to change her, that maybe now she’ll have the strength to leave her husband after all.
Contact with Ingrid unlocks an unbearable need for love that renders the narrator immobilized, unable to leave. When she finally does get out—only because Ingrid leaves her first—the sadist uses his law enforcement connections to have her committed to a psychiatric ward, seemingly because she’s a threat to his marriage. (I learned from reading Lewis’s coming out story, “Richard Nixon and Me,” republished as a zine by Semiotext(e), that it was in fact Lewis’s powerful father who had her committed in this way when she was, as a teenager, involved with a woman he decided he wanted for himself.)
In the hospital, the narrator meets Beth, a therapist. The two are immediately attached in an oozy symbiosis, with Beth providing physical support, warmth, in the form of a coat, and eventual assistance with release with a mandate for continued “treatment” with Beth.
The relationship between Beth and the narrator is where we find much of Lewis’s most beautiful writing. Reading it now, on the one hand I can imagine just how seductive the narrator must have been (Heather, too: there is a real-life “Beth” in “Richard Nixon and Me”), and how, for Beth, sexualizing the relationship must have been the only way to render contact with anyone so traumatized bearable. But I’m also angry: Beth seems transparent in the ways she’s exploiting the narrator due to her own unaddressed trauma. Yet there’s no denying that sex with Beth was revelatory. Lewis writes:
“Her carefulness, I couldn’t fathom it and so I closed my eyes . . . a fullness came into my chest, but of a different sort than I’d let myself know before, even with her. Something very old and tired roved around in there . . . and then what I recognized became beastly—wildly howling and ancient.”
Beth is a new-enough object for the narrator. And in the overwhelm of their erotic encounters, she confronts “some place between the baying and the blackness,” a primordial wild animal that’s been hidden within her since her earliest loss.
In spite of this revelation, or maybe even because of it, Notice, in the end, is unmistakably a suicide note. When the narrator is raped by three men in a sickening and almost impossible to read near-final scene, one of the perpetrators ties her with a belt from a robe (which has been worn by Ingrid, the second suspect), before tossing a bullet at her as he leaves. It’s foreshadowing: Lewis used the sash of a robe to kill herself—demonstrating the manner in which she was robbed of her breath, all room to breathe, from early life.
I’ve imagined Lewis’s suicide as a message that there is a line of being used to satisfy the needs of others, and that it was, for her, irreversibly crossed. The original edition of Notice begins with a quote from Nico: “At a crossing of the line, everything you need is mine” (Semiotext(e) will include the epigraph in future printings). At first, the line reads almost as an offering, or seductive invitation—it’s alright, take anything you want from me—but on closer reading it becomes tragic: the words spoken to the sadist who will sustain himself by taking everything from you. It’s the turn at the end of the novel, as the narrator realizes that all this time she’s convinced herself she was playing a game of seduction, she’s been courting her own death. I re-read Notice in November of 2023, in the shadow of a genocide that, among other existential dilemmas, had me finally contemplating resignation from institutional psychoanalysis. I had forgotten about how Lewis’s most searingly beautiful book had affected me on first reading. Revisiting it was like the uncovering of a repressed, or dissociated, memory.
Writing about it now, I don’t mean to sell psychoanalysis short. It was not only House Rules but a profound experience in personal analysis that gave me the ability to work with patients like J, and to live with myself. And a big part of what makes Lewis’s work so rich and exciting to me is the theory I’ve read. But in recent times, as I’ve witnessed psychoanalytic communities collapsing under the regressive forces of Zionist and transphobic white supremacy, it was almost enough to write off the whole profession as, indeed, impossible.
But when a patient told me she worried psychoanalysis wasn’t the right modality for her because “it’s a form of treatment that lets someone set forth into the abyss,” it was the thought of Heather Lewis that anchored me with what I can only call faith. In a world in which anyone awake must admit that all safety is illusory, or at the very least impermanent, the abyss is a given. The task of being with another person and facing the abyss together is one of the few forms of “security” available. Lewis’s work orients me to the abyss, and while there’s no way to know, I can’t help but feel that if she’d had a chance with the right analyst, she might still be with us.
I find myself plagued by the question of a “third suspect.” Could Lewis have survived her incest trauma if it weren’t for the abuses she suffered from psychiatry, from Purdue Pharma (Gurganus writes that after years of sobriety, she descended into OxyContin addiction), from the degrading traumatophobia of critics ill equipped to respond to her published work? (Ann Rower, her last, longtime girlfriend, writes that Heather had a breakdown following the reception of The Second Suspect.)
In this case, I’m inclined to return to the first suspect. Febos quotes Ann Rower, who said of Lewis’s father that he was “the grand villain of the piece—of all the pieces she ever wrote, every interview she ever gave, every thought she had, every breath she took.”
I read this, and I do something I’ve done countless times in recent months: I google Heather’s father, Hobart Lewis, the inspiration for the father of House Rules, whose nightly intrusions began in Lee’s early childhood, who robbed his daughter of her safety and bodily autonomy in the most literal and extreme way. Hobart Lewis was also the CEO of Reader’s Digest and a close confidant of Richard Nixon; he played a significant role in the attempts to cover up Watergate, though somehow eluded indictment.
James Baldwin said, “People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.” (This is the epigraph to Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, a contemporary, kindred book to House Rules).
The page I visit is Hobart Lewis’s obituary, on legacy.com, which shows a low-res image of elderly “Hobe” in a pink polo shirt, possibly on a screened in porch, looking like someone is telling him a funny story. He died at 101 years old, on April 1, 2011. What are we to make of such a man’s death, at such an age, on April Fools’? As much as I know now about how hidden suffering can be, I find myself trapped in the logic common to traumatized children, desperate for justice in the form of recognition of harm done. I search for signs that this man paid for what he did, and can find only one: his name on the copyright page of Notice, next to Ann Rower’s. He must, at least, have read it.
I believe that’s the end of this essay. Then, I discover in Ann Rower’s new book, If You’re a Girl: Selected Stories, 1985–2023, the piece Febos quotes in her Notice introduction: “Heather and Hobe.” I am unprepared for its devastating intimacy.
Rower claims Hobe couldn’t have read Notice, due to his vision loss and the fact that it would have been too crazy for a family member to read it to him aloud. Somehow, I hold fast to my fantasy that he found a way—apparently, he wrote letters praising its genius. But I do begin to realize that it might not have compelled him to reckon with his crimes.
What’s clear from Rower’s portrait is that this very mad man had a deep, abiding obsession with his daughter—Rower calls it love. He was proud of Heather, her love of horses and her racing career. And she ended her life in 2002 on the first Saturday in May, Kentucky Derby Day, using the belt of her favorite brown silk robe, an item she said was inspired by a dressing gown she’d seen Nico wear, backstage at a Velvet Underground show in New Jersey.