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Location: Osborne Village – Winnipeg, Manitoba
Book: I Fear My Pain Interests You – Stephanie LaCava
The title hints (correctly) at dark subject matter, but I Fear My Pain Interests You is an easy read. The tale is brief, the typeface large and the page count low. It is, in some ways, less a story and more a brief period of time spent looking through a metaphorical window on the life of the main character.
I confess: I judge books by their covers. Which is a glib way of saying that I appreciate good cover art and design. It is what attracts me to unknown books by unfamiliar writers. I’d never heard of Stephanie LaCava, but I wanted to read I Fear My Pain Interests You because it looked hauntingly beautiful, and the title suggested that the story within its pages might live up to that appearance. And in some ways, it did. The prose is plain and spare; the subject matter, while dark, is conveyed without emotion. Every character is so deeply flawed that the reader is more likely to raise an eyebrow as the plot moves forward than to feel a tug at their heart.
Books like this are the kind that I struggle to tolerate, most of the time. It’s one thing to live in the world and experience the consequences of consistent poor decision-making by people around you. It’s entirely another to choose to read about the same thing in a novel. More than once, I’ve found myself wanting to throw this type of book across the room and never pick it up again. But I Fear My Pain Interests You moved so quickly that I didn’t have time to think of doing that. By the time I was starting to feel some frustration, I’d reached the final pages.
This novel is true to life in the sense that there really are people who make bad choices over and over again without no insight into the fact that the consequences of those choices are a direct result of their own actions. Or worse, who know it but have no desire to change. It’s difficult to say, from page to page, which of those type of people Margot, the main character is. And even if you could decide, you can tell, very quickly, that there’s a reason. She lives a rarified life. And while it looks incredible from the outside it is, in fact, hollow. To complicate matters, she suffers from an untreated physical condition that she believes is all in her head… until circumstances, and an antagonist, conspire to reveal the cause of the problem that has led to at least some of the (many) others she’s managing.
LaCava recounts Margot’s story almost exclusively without telling, relying on her character’s actions to show us who she is. The novel is therefore almost devoid of description. This isn’t to its detriment, but contributes to the clipped pace at which it moves. In fact, LaCava draws a clear and fully realised character without allowing her even a brief moment of introspection in one hundred and ninety-two pages. But while we know who Margot is, we never gain an understanding of what motivates her beyond external factors – absent parents, for example, and an excess of money combined with a total lack of supervision or care, among others. It’s a style, and an effective one.
But while the story ends with finality, on the only note that makes sense, it’s the lack of why that might make I Fear My Pain Interests You an ultimately unsatisfying read for some. I appreciated it the stylistic risks the author took. I always admire an author who isn’t afraid to let words go, even ones they love. And yet, I would have been equally happy not to need to fill in all the blanks that LaCava left with my own imaginings.
