An Urn and a Plot, Steak and Champagne

In her memoir Contradiction Days (2023), JoAnna Novak sets out to write about the late Minimalist painter Agnes Martin. Traveling from her Los Angeles home to Taos, New Mexico, for a residency, Novak orders Martin’s favorite dishes at her favorite restaurants, walks through the town she once haunted, and visits the galleries that house some of her most profound pastel paintings. It’s an effort to deepen her understanding of the hermetic artist, who abruptly left New York in the 1960s and spent the rest of her life traveling and making art, often in solitude. But following Martin’s footsteps to imagine what her life might have been like quickly segues into Novak’s own self-reflections.

Everywhere she looks—in biographies, recorded interviews, the eyes of the guard at the Hardwood Museum of Art in Taos—Novak can’t help but notice how different she is from Martin, and not only because she ditched the fine arts for writing at an early age. Novak is heterosexual and glossy. She fulfills traditional gender roles and cares about her appearance. She wears Chanel espadrilles and Chanel sunglasses—more Joan Didion than Chapstick lesbian. She has a dog and a husband; she has a lot of sex; and, while writing her memoir, she is pregnant with her first child. This causes her great worry because motherhood will make her even less like Martin: less solitary, less focused on her art, more attentive to the needs of another. But being pregnant also surfaces Novak’s penchant for self-loathing. Her small, delicate body, which she has shaped and chiseled since high school, is changing to nurture a baby. She hates how her thighs look in the mirror, under the lights. She asks her husband if he’s repulsed by her body, though he’s never said such a thing. She resents the sales assistant at the maternity store who tells her how tiny she is—“a veiled insult, dressed as a ploy to get me to buy stuff.”

Contradiction Days is filled with the moments of melodrama and exhibitionism that often accompany self-destructive behavior. In addition to being hospitalized for anorexia several times—keeping each hospital bracelet like “a stamp in a passport booklet”—Novak was diagnosed with dysthymia and has attempted suicide. But the book also evinces interest in making sense of self-destructive behavior, the roots of which Novak traces to her youth. She grew up a mousy girl, “dull-looking and stout,” whom boys ignored even as she thrived in the classroom. Her mother “was always calling herself fat” and rarely gave Novak the attention she craved, a cycle she hopes she won’t repeat with her own child.

In 2019, Novak gave birth to a son, washing away the anxiety she had about the prospect of raising a daughter. In Domestirexia (Soft Skull, 2024), Novak’s fourth poetry collection, we see just how much distance there was between her fears of becoming a mother and the reality of being one. Hint: It’s not as bad as she feared. But Domestirexia reveals something a little sinister, too. Through a series of poems about quotidian routine and the contours of Novak’s inner monologue, the collection exposes what most of us who have suffered from anorexia will recognize: A disease that presents itself as an aversion to food is actually an obsession with it—a latent, lurking fixation that intrudes on otherwise innocuous activities. A weed in a garden full of green herbs.

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Eating disorders, anorexia specifically, manifest for different reasons for different people. Sometimes the disorder is about shrinking away, and other times it’s about wanting to be seen. Novak’s case is mostly about the latter, particularly pertaining to men or her mother, as she has said in interviews and in Contradiction Days. An adult and an almost-mother herself during much of her memoir, she still, in low times, reverts to the ways of her young adulthood. “I liked how she thought me high risk; when I felt bemused by my whole, dull, depressoid adult existence,” she writes, after talking to her mom on the phone about bleeding from overexertion during pregnancy. “I even liked that she talked over me, talked at me, ignored what was important to me, chided me, making light of what I did or didn’t eat . . .”

Domestirexia, on the whole, is much lighter and less ruminative than Novak’s memoir. In her poems, she doesn’t explain her fixations but, rather, exposes them slowly and methodically. Still, if one poem recalls the tones of Contradiction Days, it’s the ode “Dear Unfeeling Martinis.” Here, it’s obvious we’re reading the work of an anhedonic, self-flagellating, lapsed Catholic, a woman who finds pleasure in drinking on an empty stomach:

    Bless you, 
stomach pump.
  
Bless you,
puce hole.
 
Bless you,
balcony
 
and cool 
air that finds me 
 
éthylique
on the floor

No other poem in Domestirexia so explicitly describes self-harm, a recurring theme in the book. In another poem, “Abundance” (one of the longest in the collection, and arguably the best), we readily see the disease that lurks. Novak is breastfeeding and can’t control her bodily functions, an anorexic’s worst nightmare:

    and milk overnight 
milk filled the ghosts 
and drenched the linen

The poem then moves into a new section, a new moment, but it’s nearly indistinguishable in mother-time. Nursing her child, Novak’s daydreams blur with reality, her head gets light, her eyes go crossed; the milk in her breast travels to her young child, where it acidifies, curdles, coagulates, until the child almost looks edible:

    this boy in my arms 
his head in my palm 
little lip sweetsucked 
brown mango, soft brie a 
dream, holy day

“Abundance” isn’t explicitly about food; rather, it’s more like a list of excesses—pleasures that are perhaps unpleasurable to the person whose emotional baseline is sadness, who moves through the motions of even the brightest day with smudged glasses:

    an urn and a plot steak 
and champagne red 
wine, cocoa butter 
cakes for $14,000 
a clutch and a kitchen 
Dutch oven, springform 
back issues, back bedroom 
lily-trotter, lovebird 
lemons overwhelming

The work of child-rearing and the work of the home combine into domestic dread. But that too—the cooking, the stuffing oneself, the birdwatching in stray moments—is eventually punctuated by an ever-present nag:

    I couldn’t believe this 
cardinal hopping 
red fluff 
in the yard 
and more, green 
all day long, the spread 
of history, goodness,
the morning 
made me hungry,
unstable, and talky

In the book’s acknowledgments, Novak thanks her grandparents, “whose house was my earliest home,” as well as her in-laws, who provided her with a place to stay and write during the pandemic. The last section of poems, which revolves around the built and natural environments, as well as familial memory, seems inspired by these moments in other people’s domestic spaces. “Chinn’s” drops us into a summertime memory that has all the iconography of childhood but the perspective of adulthood. There are lawn games, humidity, some discontentment, and, inevitably, the glut of food:

    Accept it: her regular, low-grade discontent. Ration 
animal crackers. Go out, don bib, hit rum. Crabs 
and lobsters and the rolls, oh lord, rolls in garlic 
butter, table tongs. 
  
How many hurricanes in forty years? She likes 
beer—that’s new. He taught two children the 
transitive property: Wristbands and racquetball. 
Reebok tongues. She never learned how to be 
happy. He remembers so much

It’s unclear, from poem to poem, where we are in time—childhood, adolescence, or adulthood—and whether the child in her arms is her own, or the one she’s been tasked with babysitting. This effect is due partly to the associative nature of memory itself, particularly in this last section, which ranges across time and space. These poems reference death: “Thursday, Friday, Saturday, 1962, 1963, Monopoly in / the rocks and a screaming pink suit. Where were you / when you heard the news?” (“Todd at the Cemetery”). Novak also considers photographs: “She has worn a dress in Vietnam, the dress of her / photogenic ancestor, a circus spaniel washed in lace” (“simon-pure”). And featured throughout are family members whom Novak resembles, though it’s difficult for her to admit: “spending like so what, / still my mother’s daughter” she writes in “Ration Modeling: Easter,” a poem filled with “Maple cream candy, peanut honeycomb—nougat.” Like shopping compulsively for designer jeans or bespoke household sundries, so, too, sometimes is the process of eating something delicious: binge, binge, regret.

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Years ago, at age six, the journalist Rachel Aviv was one of the youngest people ever to be hospitalized for anorexia. In Strangers to Ourselves (2022), she recounts a fellow sufferer named Hava, whom she met in inpatient care. With time, support, subpar medical help, and a little luck, Aviv mostly recovered, while Hava became indistinguishable from her disease. Anorexia took over her life, morphed into her personality, and defined her entire self-conception. As with many of the other mentally ill people whose stories Aviv writes about in Strangers, Hava’s illness became her only vocabulary for understanding herself. It became “a career.”

Something similar could be said of Novak—not only because, like Hava, she seems to be consumed by her pain, but also because that pain has been a key motif throughout her oeuvre. Domestirexia is her seventh book, and like its predecessors—poems, fiction, and nonfiction alike—it deals with themes of hunger, self-harm, and disordered eating. In Novak’s novel I Must Have You (2017), all three protagonists have or have experienced disordered eating. Elliot, one of the book’s young female characters, apparently inherited her condition; her mother, a professor, is in recovery as well. Similarly, the short story collection Meaningful Work (2021) features women who count calories and have mothers who are “averse to nurturing, allergic to coddling,” as Novak put it in an interview.

While writing about Agnes Martin in her memoir, Novak admits she’s afraid of learning about the artist’s struggle with schizophrenia. She leaves that part of her research to the end of the project because she doesn’t want to pathologize Martin or analyze her work solely through the lens of mental illness. It’s an understandable and admirable goal, and yet Novak doesn’t offer herself the same grace. Even in Domestirexia, she finds moments to look down on herself—or at least has her speakers call themselves nothing more than an “éthylique” (alcoholic) “on the floor.”

She’s not alone here. How many therapists have asked their patients if they would speak to their best friend the way they speak to themselves? The obsession with binging, purging, resisting, and strategizing the best way to put oneself in pain can sometimes be so overwhelming that even acknowledging the tendency isn’t enough to change the behavior. But if there is any goal for someone who has become as burdened by their illness as Novak has, it will never be some obtuse, vague perception of “perfection,” but rather incremental growth.

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One might be tempted to turn to Novak’s previous poetry collection, New Life (2021), as an analogue for Domestirexia, as its themes also include food and the dread surrounding motherhood. But that collection feels distinctly different and from a different phase of Novak’s life—the much darker, anticipatory phase just before she gave birth. As in her memoir, Novak grapples in New Life with the anxiety provoked by a changing body: “New life / does not survive on protein alone,” she warns herself. “Trimester,” a poem from that collection, recounts a doctor’s visit that has all the resonance of the most difficult scene from her memoir, in which a scolding and unsympathetic male doctor tells her she should go on antidepressants to ward off suicidality while pregnant, a recommendation she refuses without explanation. In “Trimester,” Novak has cold jelly spread over her abdomen; the doctor looks down at her with the face of an angry father: “You are a mom now,” he reminds her, as if being suicidal was a choice.

While the themes may not be so different at first glance, the valences of Domestirexia indicate a new, more positive stage for Novak. Perhaps unpredictably, the anxiety of anticipation was much worse than the reality of the life anticipated. Her disease is no longer driving but, rather, sitting in the backseat, occasionally telling her she’s taken the wrong turn. As a result, this new collection is both more mature and more expansive than her previous work. Novak is able to explore new drifts and new places, with her eyes less turned down to her belly and more toward the beauty of the world. It’s out there that a “dog peers under the blinds, previewing opera” (“simon-pure”) and “Italian clay tiles flounced / like a thousand taffeta skirts” (“As it Is . . .”).

In one of the final poems of Domestirexia, “Water the Flowers You Want to Grow,” written entirely in French, Novak catalogs daily occurrences that feel like reminders of things to be thankful for. It reads similarly to the ode that starts the collection, in its idolization of intangible and tangible items, but its tone has shifted. The thankfulness no longer feels sensational or slowly tragic, but close to genuine. She writes about some of her favorite foods: “Nous / avons le lait, l’orange, la pizza, le chocolat.” Milk, oranges, pizza, chocolate. But then we move away from infatuation into a new realm of enjoyment, one we haven’t seen very much until this point. “Nous avons la famille. Le fils et le / pére et la femme. Nous avons le maison. Nous / avons le jardin,” Novak writes. We have family. The son and the father and wife. We have the house. We have the garden.