ooh, that sick thing reblog is making me remember it! i'm surprised there isn't a lot in the sick thing tag like there is your other fics... i remember, vaguely, you saying you weren't the proudest of it (which is totally fine, as writers, we've all been there. tho personally i loved sick thing!) do you mind sharing what was going through your head / your process writing that fic?
okay before i get into that i want to share this anecdote about Marilyn that is VERY related to sick thing.
context: i'm reading an 800 page biography of Marilyn Monroe as research for a story i'm working on, not *about* Marilyn, but. well, it's complicated.
anyway, Joe DiMaggio (the baseball player) was Marilyn's second husband, and he was an asshole to her because his star was falling as hers was rising so there was a lot of resentment. they divorced and she went on to marry (and then divorce) Arthur Miller.
shortly after she divorced Arthur Miller, she was involuntarily institutionalized by her psychiatrist. at this point in her life, everyone she knew had a personal stake in her fame and so she was just constantly manipulated and mistreated. her psychotherapist in particular, Ralph Greenson, destroyed all of her healthy personal relationships and was controlling every aspect of her life. this is about 500 pages into the book. it has taken me a while to get to this point, because it is exhausting reading 500 pages of an innocent person being taken advantage of and horribly mistreated.
allow me to set the scene: Marilyn Monroe is institutionalized in a godawful facility and completely helpless. no one will let her use a phone or have any contact with the outside world. to get somebody's attention she breaks a window with a chair, an idea she got from one of her first roles. a patient eventually sneaks her into an area with a phone. Marilyn calls everyone she knows but no one picks up.
she has no choice but to call ex-husband Joe DiMaggio, whom she hasn't spoken with since the divorce 6 years ago.
Joe immediately calls her psychiatrist and says that if Marilyn isn't discharged within a day he'll "take the hospital apart brick by brick."
and so Marilyn was then discharged and conceded to treatment at a different hospital, which she only entered on the condition that Joe could visit her every day. and he did.
even though they'd divorced on bad terms, he was basically destroyed by their breakup and spent their years apart working on himself and getting therapy so he could eventually ask for her back.
for years Marilyn endured emotional (and physical) abuse by Greenson. i can't emphasize enough that she was just his puppet. if he told her to stop seeing someone, she did. he planted a housekeeper to spy on her. but Marilyn's breaking point, the line Greenson finally crossed, was that he told her to stop seeing Joe. she finally had someone in her life with her best interests at heart, who had no personal stake in her fame or money (and who was in fact one of the few people in the world who had *more* fame and money than she did), and they fell in love again.
this is basically a full-blown Mrs. Kennedy & Me moment where i'm reading an actual real story of the tropes i write in fiction and going a little insane about it.
okay back to the ask!
for sick thing, i was working through a lot of personal fears about my own mental health, having finally gotten off a really bad med that turned me into a, i don't know, like a vacuum of a person. just empty. i wrote it in 8 very intense days, with a 5 bullet point outline scrawled on a piece of scrap paper and Hotel California on repeat.
my main criticism of it is that i resorted to very Stranger Things-y writing moves that feel cheap to me. flat antagonists with no nuance, love interests who don't have their own individual conflict or growth, over the top high school shenanigans like in a 90s teen movie, a glaringly obvious authorial self-insert with a personally cringeworthy level of wish fulfillment. i like to think that in most of the things i write, i'm pretty hard to find? or maybe not, but sick thing is just my id on a platter. was, rather. a lot has changed since then.
sick thing i think was the final work of a long held aesthetic, and dirtbag was the beginning of the era i'm in now, writing stuff far less driven by personal crises and explorations of self. i can't quite put my finger on what exactly is different other than the fact that i write much more slowly now and put more thought into my stories (at the cost of heart, potentially), and i also feel far less compelled to be read. it's been so long since anyone's read new work of mine that posting my bikeriders fic has been a real trip.
