We’re pleased to introduce Lucy Corin as the special guest to talk about Headshot, the California Book Club’s March selection, with the book’s author, Rita Bullwinkel, and host John Freeman.
Corin is an accomplished, avant-garde novelist and short story writer. Her books include, most recently, the nonlinear, sprawling 2021 novel The Swank Hotel, which explores both mental breakdown and system breakdown in the aughts. Its pages circle the story of two sisters, Em and Ad, the latter of whom struggles with psychosis and has a near-death experience. At the start of the novel, Ad has gone missing, and a group of her art-school friends call Em. Em is the primary anchoring consciousness through which we experience the events of the novel—she thinks, “Your sister is always the other possible you,” and it’s subtly intimated that even when we are in other points of view, they are filtered through Em’s ease at imagining her way into them. Psychosis is an often-misunderstood condition, and this thought-provoking book approaches a puzzling state of mind from various angles. “Psychosis doesn’t come from nowhere in the night. There’s history, but so many people know so much history and still never see it coming, or when it comes it doesn’t matter that they know it, they can hardly believe it, and even if they believe it, it’s just different when it happens to you.”
Sections focus on Em’s parents, her coworkers, her sister, and strangers, and together these porous pieces evolve into a challenging look at contemporary experience. And Corin’s novel depicts psychosis not only as a psychiatric breakdown in one of its most disturbing, painful forms but also as the breakdown of all that brings meaning to human experience, from language to family life to politics to a sense of self. In a particularly astute section that in its frank sentences is reminiscent of some of Bullwinkel’s insightful passages in Headshot, Ad narrates her experience of taking medications to treat psychosis:
I think the hardest thing about becoming sane and the squelching of the delusions might be the eradication of my belief in my own greatness. Imagine you are convinced you are a revolutionary, a prophet, a Van Gogh, a priestess, and then the meds kick in and what you really are is a nobody, and even worse than that, a psycho. It’s even harder than saying goodbye to the spirits, maybe even harder than the humiliation.
Meanwhile, as it continues, the novel destabilizes readers’ own sense of reality. Corin’s other books are the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, the short story collection The Entire Predicament, and One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, a quirky set of three longish short stories and a series of 100 intense and satisfying flash fictions.
Corin won the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize for Literature. She received a National Endowment for the Arts creative-writing fellowship in 2015 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023. She is a professor of creative writing at UC Davis.
We look forward to welcoming you to what’s sure to be a lively discussion among strikingly inventive and imaginative writers.•
Join us on March 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Bullwinkel will sit down with CBC host Freeman and special guest Corin to discuss the California Book Club’s March selection, Headshot. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
QUANTUM PHYSICS OF FICTION
Read John Freeman’s beautiful essay about Headshot. —Alta
“HEADSHOT” “BOOKTAIL”
Mix Lindsay Merbaum’s delicious cornflakes-and-milk mocktail for Thursday’s gathering. —Alta
19TH-CENTURY NIGHTMARE
Read critic Chris Daley’s review of Stephen Graham Jones’s vampire novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. —Alta
MOVIES MADE HER
Critic and author Charles Finch reviews Alissa Wilkinson’s We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, which posits that Didion’s style and outlook were shaped by Hollywood. —New York Times
RELIGION OR CULT
Critic Mark Athitakis reviews Nicole Cuffy’s O Sinners!, “both a clever literary mystery novel and a meditation on the nature of faith.” —Los Angeles Times
“END OF AN ERA”
Culture critic Peter Hartlaub considers the history behind a picture that Lawrence Ferlinghetti staged at City Lights. —San Francisco Chronicle
Alta’s California Book Club email newsletter is published weekly. Sign up for free today.
