Girls Gone Old by Fiona Helmsley

Girls Gone Old is published by We Heard You Like Books

My copy of this essay collection from 2017 has ended up blood spattered for the very embarrassing reason that I had an accident while shaving.

As you can probably tell from my photos, I’m someone who shaves a lot, so the fact that I’ve made a big bloody mess of everything absorbent (papers, clothes, towels, walls) I’ve touched in the last couple of days due to a shaving injury is distinctly embarrassing.

Obviously, it’s a not a slight nick on the head – which is a standard risk in the game – but I [accidentally] cut big chunks out of two of my fingertips while tapping the back of the blades to dislodge some impacted hair remnants.

It was a surprise for me to find the usually plastic-coated reverse of the blades to be just as sharp as the face-touching side, which is why my fingers look like they’ve been excavated.

And why this book is no longer pristine.

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Girls Gone Old is a 2017 collection of essays by Fiona Helmsley, her second book.

I read Helmsley’s first book (also a collection of essays but with some fiction thrown in) a couple of years ago, after being recommended it in one of Jarett Kobek’s excellent (perfect? flawless?) texts.

That book – my body would be the kindest of strangers – like this one, contains explorations and advocations of many of the topics I find most interesting and most important in literature (and in life), and I pounded through this collection during all of the quiet moments I had during two of the days in my first week of being full time lead parent for an infant child.

So, yes, I returned to the post-internet Life Writing style of literature at a moment when my life is in total flux…

Not only had I cut my hand while shaving, returned to do some performing for the first time in several months and returned to the UK from nine weeks in Canada, started being a full time infant carer and – actually, no, those are all the things… but all of those things have happened, which mean I was absolutely in the market for some really good writing.

These essays were exactly what I needed, in those moments of quiet found late at night or early in the morning while the baby slept its little sweet baby dreams…

Helmsley writes here on a few different topics, but mostly linked around ageing, ageing on the internet, the internet itself, and broader sociocultural trends, as well as the last throws of offline alternative communities which she was a part of when young in the 1990s…

There’s lots about addiction and recovery, as well as pieces about working in the recovery sector as a successful graduate of those spaces, which is a topic of writing that – embarrassingly – always makes me think of the bits of Infinite Jest that work best…

“Embarrassingly” because what Helmsley is writing here is far more personal, far more realistic and far less sensationalised than anything David Foster Wallace was able to produce, but I do think these kinda spaces, recovery accommodation, is a universally potent setting for writing (fiction or non-fiction) that seeks emotionality and serious explorations of humanity, because they are settings that often feature people at, close to, or just beyond major crises… In Helmsley’s writing set in these spaces, for example, we have someone who doesn’t necessarily feel like they’ve escaped an unsatisfactory self in a position where they’re helping other people who absolutely haven’t yet been able to do that…

Possibly there is an element of rubbernecking to enjoying literature of this setting, this kinda space, but I also think that any narrative form (non-fiction or realist fiction) that increases the knowledge any of us have of the world and people within it – especially people who are otherwise marginalised – is (usually) justifiable. 

Or not. No opinions here are ever held strongly.

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One of the pieces in Girls Gone Old is about the legacy of online writing to ones offline life, which is probably something I should have thought about at some point, though honestly I never have.

All the work that I’ve done for money (not including the maybe *just* four figures total I’ve made from writing in my lifetime to date) has never really mattered to me on an emotional or intellectual level.

Which is why all of the writing I had (semi-professionally) published about mental illness, about suicide ideation, about risk taking behaviours, about all that stuff… which is why I never for a moment hesitated to have that published under the same name as the name on LinkedIn profile, which I use for non-creative employment opportunities…

The real “work” is the articles and opinion pieces that paid small fees a decade ago and the micro indie-press published books that paid less than them half a decade ago… Not the office jobs and the long term roles…

Ultimately, I just don’t care about any of that stuff – obviously it’s important to earn enough money to live, but there’s no soul succour to be found in an email job, there’s no people managing that can make you feel like a person… I’ve done some good work I’ve been proud [enough] of in non-creative settings, sure… I’ve enjoyed moments of my time labouring in hospitality and events (and will certainly work in that industry again, probably in the next few weeks tbh!), but it’s never been something that’s contributed to any sense of self. It’s never been anything that’s mattered, in the way that literature does and has always mattered to me. This blog (as vapid and self-indulgent as it is!) means more to me than any paid job I’ve ever had, and though, sure, occasionally I do get one-off donations through it and, yes, there are a very small amount of paid subscribers (more always welcome and those who are here I appreciate very much! 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏), it’s not about that… It’s about keeping the practice, the the the the the…….. the writing, however bad it gets, keeping it going…

Maybe, as Helmsley writes here, doing all of this “honesty” without anonymising the self comes from a unrealistic expectation that eventually one will become able to exist financially without the the shackles of employment alongside ones creative output, but that doesn’t feel like a realistic end point and, as I’ve said before, I basically achieved all of my modest ambitions in 2018 and everything else is just–

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Yes, you can argue there’s something reductive about writing of the self when commenting on a collection of non-fiction essays, but that’s the kinda response that I find almost instinctive when engaging in conversation or in thought with openness….

At least that’s what I do… I experience someone else being open and see a moment to share my own pain rather than a moment to shut up, y’know… but… I dunno… people don’t seem to like that, sometimes… People sometimes behave as if responding with a comment about your life after someone else says something honest about themselves is inappropriate… Is this my poor level of socialisation (and poor mental health) making me misread social cues, or is this also just a weird English repression thing? I dunno. Honestly, I have absolutely no idea.

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Although an interest in online honesty and literary openness is shared between Helmsley and I, there are lots of other recurring reference points in Girls Gone Old that I don’t know too much about – there’s lots about the Charles Manson group (“The Family“), there’s lots about punk and a particular type of post-punk music/aesthetic I hadn’t heard of before (maybe “no school” or “new punk” or “new era” or “no era” punk?), there’s lots about Courtney Love, and there’s also lots about an anonymised idol of Helmsley’s who isn’t named, though I think could be recognised by the right reader due to the context clues…

There’s lots here about ideas of bodily autonomy, particularly related to discussions about public (including online) performances of one’s own sexuality as a woman and whether or not this can be a feminist act.

This topic is written about in detail w/r/t posting nudes (or otherwise intentionally sexually evocative photos – “thirst traps”, as they are now known, but definitely weren’t in the early 2000s era that Helmsley is mostly writing about) online.

There’s lots about childhood understandings of sexuality, and how misunderstandings and misapprehensions of sex in adulthood can be the result of the language used about sex… Helmsley discusses the ways in which repressive societies knowingly hoist problems upon us…

Helmsley writes about how media misinforms our knowledge of sex and sexuality. She focuses on a storyline from Little House On The Prairie and how it contributed to an idea that sex and shame were inherently linked, with sex being something that men wanted and women shouldn’t want, although women *should* want to be wanted, because to not be desired is also a position of weakness…

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“Posting nudes on the internet gets you noticed, but does it get your writing noticed?” is a question Helmsley wrestles with here, too. She concludes no, with the proviso that sometimes it doesn’t get you noticed, either…

I published an entire book of comic verse and full frontal professionally shot nude photography and that didn’t get [me] noticed at all, lol, in fact it was one of the last things I did before my writing career stalled… Tbf, that was largely due to the hefty and soul-sapping medication I was on for a few years, and theeeen by the time I was properly detoxed from that overzealous prescription, I was stuck in a very time-consuming (yet uninspiring) professional situation that I only left a few months ago, and then I immediately ran to Canada for nine weeks (during which time I was constantly moving) and I’m now back in London and now a week into the first week of possibly-several-years-who-knows-how-long-this–will-last of being primary parent to an infant child and I also started a performance practice and need to need to need to… …

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Girls Gone Old is brilliantly engaging and it’s talking about ideas that are central to the experience I also have as an olding (aging) person on the internet…

I’m about a decade younger than Helmsley, and as this book is from almost a decade ago, that means that these conversations, these ideas, are very relevant to my current life stage.

Obviously, there are many differences between the biographies of Helmsley and I (e.g. I’m not American and I’ve never had any serious physical health ailments (e.g. Helmsley writes about recovering from hepatitis)), but I do have a documented history of mental illness and I do have a child and I do have no money and a long history of being excessively (in some opinions) open about my personal life online, so it is all familiar and personalised and seems… I don’t know I don’t know I didn’t know I don’t know…

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I loved Girls Gone Old. I love Helmsley’s voice, which is very witty, very engaging, very emotive, very informed, very articulate, very wise…

The text here is direct, clear, funny and fun but also serious and important…

It’s both personal and political (the personal is always political, innit, as we know), and never feels self indulgent.

I really enjoyed this essay collection.

Highly recommended.

Thank you very much.

Read more at the publisher’s website