The Fear, a memoir by the author and artist Christiana Spens, opens with an account of the most Parisian of existential crises. A ‘newly heartbroken philosophy graduate’ in ‘the city of Sartre and de Beauvoir’, she is too depressed to get out of bed: ‘It was as if standing was falling, too pointless even to attempt.’ Finally driven outside by hunger, she ends up ‘wandering around a French supermarket wanting to die’. She finds temporary relief in stealing a housemate’s Diazepam pills, but the escape she longs for is love: ‘Nothing worked the way love did’; it was ‘the ideal, the solution, the cure’. Her consciousness of being ‘one more cliché in a city full of them’ only intensifies her agony.
But this book is anything but an assortment of clichés. It roams so widely – narratively, emotionally, intellectually – that it’s almost impossible to categorise. It is a memoir – a powerfully affecting tale of devastation and survival. But it is also a tour around a prodigious array of topics related to the theme of fear. On one page Spens explores the ways in which terrorism is ‘mythologised’ to serve the aims of the powerful; on another she finds a kind of spiritual dimension in masochism, calling it a search for ‘peace and the disintegration of our own egos’. She considers the work of figures from Jacques Lacan to Lana Del Rey, Edgar Allan Poe to Patti Smith. A formidable bibliography includes Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche (although, curiously, no Kierkegaard, the great philosopher of anxiety).
In case it isn’t already obvious, Spens trained as an academic. She recounts how, after completing a PhD on depictions of terrorists in the media, she realised she had been ‘using thinking as an escape from feeling’.
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