Depth Control, a collection of essays and autofictions, is forthcoming in April 2025 from Unsolicited Press.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Much like the narrative self-in-flux at the heart of the story, Depth Control defies easy genre categorization. On the one hand, it is a very old story: a young woman coming of age, inhabiting a body, comprehending sexuality, contemplating gender, and negotiating the loss of one relationship and the possibility of others. Then again, the narrator and text likewise move in and out of traditional forms, containers, iterations of being and embodiment.
The book, the shape of language, challenges and provokes. This provocation is purposeful.
Depth Control is an essayist’s experiment. It is a sense-making, a self-checking, all in an effort to capture and hold a singular, layered, sensory understanding—of identity, of belonging, of the will to act and to choose. The narrative revolves around a speaker/protagonist in her thirty-second year, where she finds herself on a threshold, struggling to move past a recent breakup while subconsciously still processing an older, more significant lost relationship and questioning her agency as a single, sexual, love-worthy woman.
Torn between the need for self-knowledge grounded in solitude and the longing to be truly seen by another, this speaker—and with her, the very prose on the page—interrogates the boundaries of the self and the complexities of relationship by diving deep into the past, revisiting a childhood enchanted by make-believe, an awkward adolescence, and the intoxication and disillusionment of first love. These explorations of self and other center the body—aesthetically, sexually, in confinement and up close—as a means of encountering and knowing the world.
Inventive in structure and language and rich in metaphor—from slippery pronouns, dress-up clothes, and dreams of spontaneous cat birth, to bruxism, bad sex, and the bight of the Northern California coastline—each chapter layers with the rest to render a nonlinear narrative of love, intimacy, self-knowledge, and solitude—all the while reveling in language and the odd bits of a life that lend it texture, like the fraying seam inside the pocket of a black wool coat that makes it mine (or yours).