I have absolutely no idea how this book came across my radar originally. Probably while doom-scrolling on bookstagram, but I didn't save any posts or reviews, so I got nothing now. Anyways, I know for sure I was drawn in by the title, so I Googled it, and learned that dyscalculia (at least to my understanding) is like dyslexia for numbers. Fascinating. Mostly the only other thing I caught was that this was a memoir, but I'm usually into those (especially if they cover situations/themes I haven't encountered much before...enter dyscalculia), so onto the TBR it went.
In Dyscalculia, Felix opens with going through a life-altering breakup, a relationship that basically imploded. This experience opens into an entire revisiting and processing of her childhood trauma and mental health (content warning for sexual abuse/rape, in-hospital stays for mental illness, and a variety of interactions with menal health care providers and systems). As a framework for this exploration of pain and heartbreak and breaking down and healing, Felix uses mathematics, and her relationship with it, to illustrate the philosophies and (mis)calculations of love and relationships and her own life.
So, I went into this expecting a more "traditionally" written memoir, primarily because I didn't know about Felix's history, as it were, as a poet. But, as with all more prose style works that I have read by poets (like One Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing and The End We Start From), I got such a different reading experience from it, more like a lyrical journey, a feeling, than a linear "story of a life." And I loved that. The writing was stunning. Such an elegiac communication of the myriad overlapping and contradicting emotions and fallout of heartbreak and trauma. The way she is processing her life and identity and feelings on page in words is devastating, in all that ways that word can be interpreted (destructive, gorgeous, shattering, dazzling). It's the kind of writing that you have to reread and/or re-listen to (I did both) parts of in order to really find everything she's trying to say. And even still, the individuality of every readers' life/background means that there will always be something we’re missing because we are on the outside, but for some reason that creates not distance but connection here.
Topically, I guess this is, as advertised, about a breakup, but honestly it's more like the memoir was spurred by one. The breakup was a catalyst, but it was never Felix’s actual story, or at least not the one she needed to tell, even though she didn’t realize that until after. I was also just as conceptually fascinated with the reality of dyscalculia, as well as how it something more intense/profound (like bipolar) might present as something like dyscalculia in a child/adolescent, as I had anticipated. In both a general sense and in the way that Felix used it as a scaffold for the book. Her mental illness and masking and diagnosis (and lack thereof) all fold together with a mathematical poetry, a lyricism of numerical language, that is complex and lovely and profound and emotional and just brings together the beauty in those two seeming opposites - numbers and letters - in such a unique and impactful way.
This is a book, a memoir, a reading experience like few I've had before. And, since you can get through it in a single day (or even sitting), I really recommend giving it a try!
“Children see the world clearly when they first come into it. It's circumstance that sullies the walls of our terrariums, less and less light getting in each day.”
"Time is an anarchy. There are whole sections of years that have, in my mind, disappeared, time revealing its tricks to me like a cocky necromantic. The gaps are caverns of absence, temporal wormholes, where all I can recall is the sensation of being stretched between many different dimensions of crisis at once."
"We are all in common crisis - lending our sex to fantasies (or delusions) of worth."
"...math is the same in every language - and cause and effect is too."
“…think of the soul as a string that spans the length of your lifetimes, and that string gets to see a different life every century or so, and each life is a chance, in a series of chances, to build a pathway back to the divine, to wind the string back toward your soul's ultimate home…”
“Haunted by the threat of perpetual incompletion, I wanted to be able to say I did a hard thing well without being pulled to the cross about it, that I learned to bury the worst of myself for someone else's happiness, the sharp remains of my unresolved youth-hood clinging to the underbelly of my ambition, begging to be taken with.”
"Love itself is an unfair bargain and most of the time it's missing the point. / Who would I be if not a woman who can run up against the tides of her cliches?"
“Masking was me thinking the labor of hiding was equivalent to the labor of care, but it was a convenient lie we both let me tell.”
“What I know now is that love is a chaos system dialing us into our highest selves and troubling the foundation of what makes us us. And with a chaos system, all you can control is what you can account for, whatever you can quantify and collect.”
“…how numbers become shapes, and how shapes become functions, and how functions become systems, and how systems can be disrupted. If I know the line, then I know its function. And if I break the function, the system cannot survive.”
“When you’re healed you tell the story differently.”