Hell Is a Teenage Girl
Reviews
By Mila Jaroniec
The jacket copy of Juliet Escoria’s fourth book and second story collection, You Are the Snake (Soft Skull, 2024), suggests a boldly feminist, intrepid reading experience—“depths of girlhood and new womanhood and [discovering] oddness, impulse, and yearning,” “subverting expectations about who women can be and what they can write.” The cover is candy pink and delicious, with a big White Stripes-esque whirly pop. A smart, pretty book that promises explorations of “mental health, substance use and recovery, nature, and higher education” within its pages. A hot girl beach read, for sure.
Not to call the jacket copy reductive, because yes, those things are there. The animal strangeness of girlhood. The agonies and rages of adolescence that come in flashes like electrical storms. Bad drugs. Shitty jobs. Weird friend-group dynamics. Family, belonging, the shadowlands of ancestry. Anxiety. Cruelty. Loneliness. Our attempts to communicate across the chasms between us, blunt stabs at connection in an indifferent world. All there. But the book is not about those things, not the sum of those things. Rather, it seems to be more interested in what holds them together. The fascia. The glue.
At its core, You Are the Snake is about violence.
Each of the nineteen stories examines violence of varying types, from the violence we do to each other to the violence our minds do to us, to the random, unspecified violence of the incalculable universe, to the intolerable violence inherent in the idea of an almighty, apathetic God, who either wants bad things to happen or doesn’t care if they do. Loosely organized in four ascending sections, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood and beyond, the collection melds into an imagistic sequence, like different episodes in the life of one person or different people in the life of one episode—an aggregate of voices, places, and forms traveling along the same raw nerve.
In “The Hot Girl,” the titular hot girl, prone to violent rages, stabs her boyfriend for no real reason and feels zero remorse. The young narrator of “Pluck It Out” punches and considers drowning her trichotillomaniac best friend at the pool because she made a rude comment about her pubic hair. In “The Ryans,” two girls exact revenge on the boy who sold them oregano instead of weed by breaking into his house, trashing his room, and stabbing his desk with a hunting knife while pretending it’s him—“Stab stab stab. It felt so good. I imagined his screams.” “Roadkill” begins with the narrator accidentally killing a cat and ends with her and her friends sexually assaulting a frat boy in an alley just because they can. Dark shit. That said, Escoria’s girls are still normal teenagers. They wear short skirts and cucumber melon body spray and Hard Candy nail polish, play video games and smoke Marlboros and watch MTV. They fight their constant urges. To laugh out loud when someone dies, to crash their cars and slit their wrists. They fight the urge to murder.
Among the subtle narrative links binding the disparate stories is the steady unfolding of bipolar depression. Early warning signs (“Sometimes in the mornings I could barely get out of bed, this feeling like some beast was crouched on my chest”) give way to themes of understanding, coping, and self-knowledge, the uncontrollable emotions and derailing surges of rage eventually shrinking down into old, familiar feelings—“the old feeling overtook me, that red wash of rage”; “the old feeling I got where I wanted to die.” Drugs, then addiction, creep in, various attempts to quiet down minds that refuse to self-regulate. Then maturation. Acceptance, recovery. Learning to embrace and cohabitate with a brain that feels like its own untamable animal, a constant potential psychokinetic threat, like spontaneous combustion: “The mind did it to the body. Every time I got upset, I waited for it to happen to me. I could feel the fire starting, the embers in my chest feeding one another until I burst into flames.”
Also, everything is trying to kill you. In “Rational Fears for Only Children,” the speaker journeys through the dormant terrors of childhood that still haunt her, from killer amoebas to the aforementioned spontaneous combustion, Halloween candy to still water: “Something that had once been benign was now deadly, a threat.” “Natural Selection” uproots Andrew Marvell’s poetic landscape of sensual flora, presenting instead a carnivorous ecosystem poised to devour us the moment we hit the soil. “Is It Jackal or Is It Dragon” closes the book with a litany of sobering facts Édouard Levé would have been proud of, in which we can feel the sad nature of our smallness, the thinness of our cosmic thread. God, a desire for safety and salvation, also crops up in the last quarter, but even He is in on the joke—in “Santa Muerte,” a problem child who finds Christ becomes a nun and follows His call from her convent in California to one in West Virginia, where she feels at peace, closer to God than she’s ever been, before eventually getting murdered by some creep in the woods. Just because.
The connective tissue of the world—of God’s creation—is violence.
Arguably the most visceral and ambitious piece in the collection is “Hazel: A Diptych,” which features the parallel narratives of Ada (b. 1985), a young woman with bipolar disorder digging into family history after the loss of her aunt, and Hazel (b. 1916), the grandmother she inherited it from, who could only understand her condition by how it felt. The attempt to not only access but understand, humanize, and channel an ancestor responsible for things as unforgivable as sexually abusing her own children is a tough undertaking for any artist, but Escoria’s execution is balanced and elegant, the past and present converging at tender vanishing points, along with some of the most resonant, achingly precise depictions of the bipolar mind’s inner landscape: “I felt myself being plucked like a guitar string, each moment a new emotion—here is boredom, here is joy, here is grief, here is shame—and I felt each note to my core, yet none of the feelings belonged to me.”
You Are the Snake is a field study, a voyage through the inhospitable terrains of a live-wire mind, its transformative power subtle and invasive like the skin cells we breathe in with the dust. Each story is compact and tightly coiled, a snake ready to strike, but you never know when. Some of them end prematurely, in violent cuts. Some fizzle out or detonate, no two the same. It’s easy to imagine an Escorian heroine bringing one of the many “stupid boys” who populate the book right up to the moment of climax, then pulling her hand away and laughing maniacally, no finish. Complementing her structural variations, Escoria’s writing is clean and airtight, not a messy sentence anywhere. Anything missing has been left out on purpose, the effect of which is not so much space for the reader as black holes to fall into. With every scorching installment, Escoria reminds us she’s not here to entertain, or satisfy, or provide. She is here to rip off a layer of skin and expose the raw truth beneath.
Mila Jaroniec is the author of two novels, including Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover (Split Lip Press). Her work has appeared in Playgirl, Playboy, Joyland, Ninth Letter, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, PANK, Hobart, The Millions, NYLON and Teen Vogue, among others. She earned her MFA from The New School and teaches writing at Catapult.
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