I read BookTube's "Most Disturbing Book Ever."
And oh how it lingers with me
Though we often complain about social media and its ill effects, distraction, etc., one positive benefit of our app addictions is that occasionally an amazing and previously rather unknown book will break through the noise and reach a new audience. It only takes one enthusiastic reader’s video or tweet to cause a chain reaction large enough to yank a book out of obscurity and thrust it into bestseller/reprint territory. Such is the case of Notice, by Heather Lewis, dubbed “The Most Disturbing Book,” by a BookTuber named CriminOlly, whose video went viral, racking up almost half a million views and thousands of comments. His video became the single catalyst for the once out-of-print novel Notice’s multi-country reprint, new cover, and new introduction by the bestselling author of Body Work, Melisa Febos.
Prior to the viral BookTube video, Notice barely sold and had been out of print for almost 20 years. After the video, but before the reprint, the price of the few circulating used copies jumped to hundreds, even thousands of dollars on eBay.
As Olly says in the video, Notice is “Incredibly moving. Incredibly bleak, incredibly harrowing… It really is horrific. If you think you can take it, I highly recommend reading it.”
This completely effed-up novel’s three covers:
*Notice, by Heather Lewis, has all the content warnings I can fathom. You might not want to read it if you have an active case of PTSD stemming from any form of abuse.
**This is a spoiler-free post, other than discussing the book’s premise.
Notice How People are…
Now, you might be asking yourself—why would anyone want to read “the most graphic depiction of trauma?” Well, studies have shown that people read horror, violent texts, and trauma-filled texts for the following primary reasons:
Arousal/excitement/sensation
Mood management
As a coping mechanism
For social bonding
For cultural catharsis
I’d say for me it’s mostly #1. I love horror, so when I heard a superlative like “most disturbing book ever,” I just had to know what was inside the book! Let me say, it lived up to its “most disturbing” description.
And regarding the 5th, cultural reason, I believe this book would not have been rejected by publishers had it been pitched after the #Metoo movement. It might have even become a bestseller on the first printing, but Lewis wrote it in the late 90s, well before its time.
And before we get further into Notice, which I bravely read with eyes-wide-mouth-open-head-shaking fervor, I want to say thank you also to everyone who sent emails and left amazing and insightful comments on my essay about Hillbilly Elegy last week. I’ve actually updated the post with some additional info, pictures, and a MABAM rating after your feedback.
Notice How it Lingers
Notice is almost too complex to describe in a one-sentence premise, but, in short, it follows a suburban girl who becomes a prostitute and a drug addict, finding herself in a dark world, in a trauma spiral, moving from one predator to another.
It’s written in a very interior, meandering style that feels unique and fresh, almost experimental.
I once heard the author and publishing expert Courtney Maum say something along the lines of, “If Judd Apatow wouldn’t shoot the scene in your novel for his movie, it probably doesn’t need to be there.”
And immediately, I thought of Notice.
Judd Apatow probably wouldn’t film 75% of the scenes in this book. Yet, I’ve maybe never read a novel that felt more real than Notice, and though the book is NSFW literary fiction, it’s been adopted and read by the horror genre community, and indeed, it’s scary. It’s frightening first-person POV realism.
In a Reddit post dedicated to tracking down the book after Olly’s video, but before the reprint, readers described it as, “disturbingly real… it was written in a way that had me questioning this typical trope of story telling. Her name, her age, even her background story was not of relevance.”
Now, Courtney Maum wasn’t talking about Judd Apatow not shooting a scene because it’s too graphic or violent or sexy, which all of Notice also is, but rather, she was referring to including unnecessary logistics or lengthy scenes of cerebral ponderings. She suggested that writers should externalize major conflicts in their novels if they want to get major book deals.
This novel does the opposite, and perhaps that’s why it was rejected 18 times by publishers, and wasn’t published until 10 years after the author’s death. Notice has action; things happen, so many things, but the action is the setting, almost an afterthought, and the real story is cerebral.
The standard literary advice is to condense scenes to their core reader takeaways. For example, you don’t need your character to fly from England back home to Colorado to think about her life. Instead, have her say one sentence about her life to a coworker that captures her emotion without several scenes of travel.
Or, avoid a lengthy scene in a movie where the main character calls into work sick, reaches her boss’s voice mail, leaves a message, etc., if the only thing we need to know is that she’s sick. Just show her in bed coughing and sneezing. Condense, condense, condense to the essential is usually the advice of screenwriters and book editors.
However, in Notice, we do need these scenes. These scenes become the entire book because nothing holds much meaning for our main character, a woman adrift in the underbelly of an nondescript city. She is any woman. She is all women. She is only her own thoughts.
Here is a sample of the text to show you what I mean:
“He hadn’t had to roll up his sleeves, and from this I thought about Ingrid the other night in the bathtub and how I couldn’t quite understand her. Him still in his cufflinks persuaded me that’d been a lie. That I knew exactly and had known it then. Only I hadn’t wanted to admit it and I was beginning to see how this sort of refusal on my part—this unwillingness to admit to things stronger than me—didn’t keep me from trouble but kept leading me to it.”
You might find this rambling, but her writing style sucks the reader into the main character’s head.
Likewise, the text is skint on punctuation, and rarely is there a comma, because the narrator is riding an unending wave of undoing, without pauses, with bad moments blending together.
The lost female protagonist, Nina, roams from place to place, parking lot to car to another car, bedroom to bathroom to bedroom, bar to bar, lover to lover, lost in her own misery like a ghost.
The unnecessary logistics and random half-thoughts are the very things that make the trauma real. As one BookToker noted, “It is the most graphic depiction of trauma that I have ever read in my entire life,” and I wholeheartedly agree.
Also, it’s extremely sexually graphic, and the sex is more sad than erotic. I don’t want to say every page has a sex scene, but probably every three pages has one.
I couldn’t put it down. I burned through it, but was also worried by it because I know there are women right now in the real world experiencing the horrific life Lewis describes, and I’m still haunted, and still thinking about it even though I finished it a few months ago.
Notice the Quit Lit with no Quitting
Whatever you’re guessing the disturbing parts are, you’re probably wrong, because they’re things I couldn’t even dream up and it’s more than one thing.
It’s QuitLit with no quitting…
It’s literary horror, but not really horror. It’s psychological drama, confessional autofiction, and lesbian erotica, but not erotica.
It is allegedly very autobiographical. Lewis was born in 1962 and went to Sarah Lawrence College. She wrote House Rules, a novel based on how her father had abused her, The Second Suspect, and Notice. She also contributed to several anthologies. Her father, Hobart Lewis, ran the Reader’s Digest and was Richard Nixon’s good friend.
Acclaimed author Melissa Foebs wrote in the new foreword for Notice, “This book is set to detonate in the minds of readers, generation after generation. To remind us how hard and pure a truthful work of art can be. Brace yourself.”
The New York Magazine Book Review described Lewis as belonging to a literary movement of “New Narrative Writers” who “saw no difference between experience and our representations of it.”
If you’ve ever been abused by a lover, ever lived a high-risk life, or ever been an addict, I think you’ll find this novel accurate.
In addition to portraying trauma realistically, it’s the most realistic addiction story I’ve ever read. There is no redemption, like in real life, where many addicts never quit. However, addiction isn’t the main plot at all. Like the violence and sex in the book, it’s the background noise. Her drug use is mentioned in passing, in brief moments, but you sense she’s always seeking, always looking for a fix of some kind, like in this passage towards the end of the book, one of the few that overtly mentions drugs:
“What I did instead was get dressed. If I left soon I could go by the bar before I saw Beth. I did this but I didn’t find Burt or Jeremy. I settled for buying a bag off a guy at the bar and smoking it there in the bathroom. I thought this might get me further than snorting. It didn’t. Not very. Though it did get me to Beth’s. Late again and not exactly well put together.
I tried to remember where she and I had last been. Could only remember her driving me home. Now that I was with her I couldn’t place what had come before. But somewhere I must’ve known because I couldn’t sit down for the longest time. It’d been quite a while since I’d felt the true need for this game. It had only become a habit.”
Lewis doesn’t overdo it; like so many trauma victims and addicts, she’s in a detached state of disassociation. Her writing is simple, stripped, flat, impoverished, and gray; but her passages sting with brutal insight into the more tragic parts of a young woman’s condition.
On page one of the book, Nina/Lewis explains why she turns tricks, for cash and something else—“What the extra need is, the thing beside’s money? I’ve never pinned it down. I know it’s there though.”
Her writing gives no regard to literary writing “rules,” MFA advice, or common novel conventions.
The book just happens in a drugged-out daze that addicts will recognize.
The girl ends up sex working for a married couple; only things get incredibly messed up, in ways that are believable, but hard for me to type, and this is only the beginning; the real story starts when a therapist, Beth, tries to help Nina.
So much happens that the novel contains three novels within it. All three stories could be the single premise for a very strong novel. Nina is hyper-focused on her body’s sensations, more so than on the chaos unfolding around her. Her thoughts are not of the future or the past; her thoughts are tactile.
She’s driven to disaster by her desire for intense sensation, mostly because she doesn’t want to think, as everything she needs to think about is awful. The disappearance into pleasure or torture, anything immensely distracting is her only escape, and the reader escapes along with her.
I found this very relatable because in active addiction, which I’ve experienced, the drive for pleasure supersedes everything, and that’s how addicts find themselves in terrible situations.
Here is another taste:
The corner I’d backed into felt almost homey…
To see what happened with her made me feel dumb and run over. Like all the time I’d spent so worried about her husband was wasted because it left me wide open to her. And then she’d hit me so hard I barely noticed.
You understand, right? How I could land on my back and just lie there? From that position, it’s hard to make sense of things. Hard not to get caught up in someone telling you the things you’ve wanted to hear your whole life, and so does it matter if what they’re saying is true? In that moment, I mean? Does it matter?
Notice the Reader Reactions to the Realism
Like every great book, reactions are extreme, from five stars to one, with little in between.
The lovers of Notice echo my feelings about the book:
And to be honest, it was triggering too. It made me reevaluate parts of my own life. It rattled my snow globe and though I’m not a lesbian, I saw myself in the main character, Nina, over and over again.
Writers speak of “voice,” “closeness,” and “interiority” and this novel had the most of all of that. The only novel I can think of that comes close for me is the Japanese classic, No Longer Human. But Notice feels even closer because the character is my same demographic, living in the same era, whereas No Longer Human is about a Japanese man living in the past.
Those that disliked the book had equally strong opinions.
Public Notice: Don’t Give Up on Yourself or Your Books
If only Heather Lewis could see Notice now, with its many glowing reviews, critical acclaim, and hardcore fans, but she can’t, because, like the author of No Longer Human, Heather Lewis killed herself. She died in 2002 at age 40. I won’t describe her method of departure, as it’s too much for a newsletter, but it was dramatic and novelistic.
I’m so sad she didn’t live to see her third and last novel’s renaissance moment. I’m sad she never knew that Notice no doubt was just written before its time, that publishers aren’t always right about books.
I also watched this interview with the author, I think. It’s hard to find images of her, and if this isn’t her, it’s another Heather Lewis with a similar story. Notice was is inspired by her real experiences and struggles with drugs and alcohol. That’s what makes it even harder to read, even more disturbing. According to Melisa Febos in the introduction, many publishers rejected the book for being to autobiographical, and Lewis was devastated by these rejections.
Febos quotes one editor in the introduction who wrote, “we wish to believe it’s happening solely on the level of Allegory,” and she notes, “Any knowledge of the author’s life makes such wishes impossible… Only fellow survivors could appreciate it.”
Finally, the title itself is also brilliant, but to explain how would be a spoiler.
My MABAM Rating:
MABAM Key—From left down to right down.
Heroic Dose: A book that rattles you to your core, transforms you, a masterpiece.
Cry It Out: You cried while reading. Yep, you cried.
Hit’s Fast: The page-turner. The non-stop fast read you can speed through. I read it in two days.
On the right from up to down:
MindFluk: It messes with you, drops you into mixed emotions, has elements you feel torn about.
Body High: NSFW. Feel it under your skin and maybe in all the wrong/right places. You might need a cigarette after reading.
If you liked No Longer Human, or the movie Requiem for a Dream, and you don’t mind copious amounts of violence or lesbian and heterosexual sex in graphic detail, you’ll probably be transfixed by this book. It’s not forgettable. I found it to be a perfect literary novel.
Read the novel if you’re into dark shit.
And don’t ever kill yourself, please.
Now You
Would you read this?
Have you read this?
Why or why not?
What are some other books you’ve read that might be similar to this one?
That’s all.
XXXOOO
Charlotte Dune
I enjoyed your review but I couldn't read it, too disturbing. I find this sort of thing makes everything I look at go dark, at least while I'm reading it. I do like the YT channel Soft White Underbelly which is interviews with mostly homeless drug addicts.
It's Carol Joyce Oates' biography of Marilyn Monroe. So well-written, raw and disturbing.