Sick Protest Novel

raise your sick voice // a craft essay

When I started to write a novel about the end of abortion rights, abortion rights were fine. It was summer 2020. Most things weren’t fine. Abortion access wasn’t fine and hadn’t been in a while. But Roe looked like a solid fortress, holding off the bans and the heartbeat bills, if not the TRAP laws and their constant assault. Then Roe fell. What? In 2025 if you need an abortion, if you need gender-affirming care, your fate depends on where you are, where you can get to, what that will cost. They’re trying to shame you because you want to live.

The novel in question, State Champ, is about protest. Or the novel is a form of protest. A protest needs practice, like the quitting speech you don’t give until you do. I’d written a lot about protest and its forms—its potentialities, frustrations, futilities, modes of relation. But that was before.

Before, I thought I was smart and not naïve. But I was clinging to an idea of order, I can see that now. When the genocide started, I could really see it: the end of that myth of order. Now I’m waiting to lose my next naivete. If you can see that epistemological cliff ahead of you, it’s time to run right off.

When your naivete disappears, you feel surprised. When Roe fell, when the genocide started, my surprise didn’t even make sense to me, the surprised person. I resembled the people who are most annoying to me, the ones I encounter while they’re walking on a public path in a public park and I’m running, I approach them from behind and call out politely “On your left!” or “Excuse me, thanks!” and they start screaming bloody murder. “You surprised me!” they say. “Oh, you scared me!” They might be listening to music or sunk deep in their phones, though sometimes they’re just daydreaming, which I support. But our relationship is impossible. I often want to ask this surprised person, “Why did you think you were alone? What did you think the world was? We have both been seeing so many other people on this public path in this public park.” “You’re the third person who has scared me!” a memorable woman once said. She was actually crying. “I’m sorry,” I said, though I didn’t sound sorry, but I had stopped to talk to her when she started crying, I’m not an asshole. “What is safety to you?” I wanted to ask. And now I keep asking myself.

I have always tried to be smart. I was voted most likely to succeed. My pride was most satisfied when I did well in a class while failing to regularly attend. Illness helped with the not attending. I have a neurological disorder. It’s private, a darkness. I got out of the hospital and looked at the assignment for the final paper. The class was called “Nietzsche & Freud.” Unfortunately it was December and I’d never read Nietzsche. The assignment was two columns that listed all the readings we’d done that semester. Pick a text from each column and compare them. I had only read one thing on the entire page. What? I was just out of the hospital and I was angry. I picked something short from the right list and read it hatefully. I got some sort of prize for the paper. This is the sort of smart I’m most proud of. Who’s the best sick person? The only book I’d read, by the way, was Rilke’s only novel. It starts: “So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.”

“I have been out. I saw: hospitals.”

Illness is a protest: disorder. You’re not there, behaving right in the shared right place, you’re in the wrong place, at home, fucked out and watching Law & Order for days, not able to walk or think or read. It’s not your choice but what is choice. Did I choose to become a professor or are both my parents professors? I am my context, my demographic, I always order an IPA. Illness did not vote me most likely to succeed.

There’s a key moment in writing every novel when you should stop being smart. That’s not so hard. What’s hard is you have to stop wanting to be smart. You have to let go of the recognition you’ve pictured not just for yourself but as yourself. Stop thinking your boss’s boss will finally like you if you can just make your case. Why are you still thinking about that? Why are you picturing that recognition? When I’m sick, I can’t think well. I can’t think clearly. I’ve always hated this. I’ve always preferred being able. When I wrote an illness memoir I called the sick me her, because she doesn’t have access to language like I do (the well one is writing this). So I tend to feel like I’m speaking on her behalf, or speaking over her, because I don’t like her sick language. But what if I spoke as her, what if she was me?

The narrator of State Champ is on a hunger strike in a shut-down abortion clinic, that’s her protest. She’s not well. After Roe fell, I went back through and tried to do the one thing I’ve never done. Let my language be sick. Stop being so intelligible.

While revising I listened to the album The Teaches of Peaches. On the opening track Peaches repeats four syllables, “Huh / What / Right / Uh,” in varying order and emphasis. I started taking her question seriously: “What else is in the Teaches of Peaches?” I started repeating it to myself.

And kept on repeating it. I had low expectations of Biden but I didn’t expect the genocide. Why not? I had low expectations of the university but I didn’t expect they would just support the genocide. Why not? I’d been there the whole time.

If you’re a teacher (“Stay in school,” Peaches says, “it’s the best”), right now you’re watching as the government disappears our students. Ends free speech, codifies so many cruelties.

When I first got a full-time university job, I was happy. When smart people said things like “The institution will not save you,” I disagreed. I thought, but what if it’s a good institution. I was so fucking stupid. Now I try to feel that stupid again every day—like, the moment when you realize, ashamed of your own surprise. What else is in the Teaches of Peaches?

The good in any institution was ours, we were just letting them use it. See what they did with it. If you are feeling sick right now, that’s right. Feel sicker. The body knows. The shame is endless. They’re using AI to kill students and teachers in Gaza while cheerfully opening a new AI center at your school here. It will generate such intelligible prose.

I don’t know what your protest should be because I’m stupid and I believe in you. Any act of care. Any bad idea. Do not make sense to them. It’s time for the hospital. In the hospital we practice for the back alley. In the hospital every single person is scared and everyone knows we can’t all win. But we care for each other and we leave, if we get to leave, with the clarity of anger. Somewhere in you is a sickness that law and order has not understood. It’s private, a darkness, and they’ve always wanted you to feel ashamed of it. I know you don’t like it. But it’s time to go there. Success will not save us. Time to speak from that sick place.