WHAT HAPPENS WHEN one’s self-destructive tendencies can’t be therapized, medicated or even loved away? What if it’s not a phase, something you grow out of? Laney lives in New Jersey with a saintly husband and two kids, yet she can barely get through the banalities of civilized life—school drop-off, a vacation, a baseball game— without a bump of coke here, a wildly inappropriate tryst there.
It’s the sort of acting out that a good man, a good shrink, rehab and even reconciling with her absent father hasn’t been able to fix. Good mothers, especially welloff ones, aren’t supposed to fall down after taking too many Xanax.They’re not supposed to get caught licking cocaine off the bathroom floor.
I Smile Back is Upper West Side author Amy Koppelman’s second book. Her first, A Mouthful of Air, was a brutal depiction of an Upper West Side mother drowning in post-partum depression. Both are novels, not thinly veiled autobiographies, but “the feelings in my novel, the fear, the endless self-doubt, well, all that stuff is pretty close to the bone,” she says. So why does Laney do it—and why do I find her behavior so disturbing? She knows that “A good person doesn’t humiliate her husband. But then again, a good person doesn’t cheat, doesn’t fuck around for sport. Good and bad, though, aren’t mutually exclusive are they?” She provokes her husband for the hell of it: “I’m thinking of writing a book,” she tells him. “On prostitution.”
“Just to have sex to feel nothing, that’s very hard for people to accept. I think she does that because in those moments, she feels nothing, and she’s able to escape all of her fears.”
Laney’s main fear is that she’s ruined her kids—son Eli, for example, is already exhibiting strange tics, early signs of OCD, and she’s afraid of damaging him further— he’s “wired to implode,” he’ll “never grow into the man he could have... if he had a different mother.”
Her paranoia is not without humor: at one point Laney recalls to her shrink frantically rooting through the garbage for the tip of her infant son’s foreskin after his bris—apparently it was supposed to be buried for good luck. Now she’s screwed him up before he even had a chance. Upon calling the mohel who had performed the circumcision, he nonchalantly replies, “Don’t worry about it. I buried it in a pot on 61st and Madison. Right in front of Barney’s.”
The book “isn’t limited to the whole unhappy-woman thing,” explains Koppelman. “It’s more about being the child of some kind of abuse or mental illness. I was wondering what happens after the apologies.Then what? On one hand, the reader might say she should get over that—but to a degree, everyone exists in the fallout of their childhood. She built her whole life to not be like her father, and then she just destroys it.” Even after making peace with her dad, Laney’s angry to realize that he’s “thriving.
Another second-chance father, little-league coach, carpooler.” It isn’t fair that he’s OK and she isn’t. Laney thinks damaging her children is “inevitable,” given her considerable shortcomings and morbid impulses, but as Koppelman says, “I hope it comes through that she does love those kids, [but] she realizes what she’s unable to do for them.” She only feels victorious when, for example, she finds herself being repeatedly slammed against a brick wall after sex with a stranger—a bar-trash hick who laughs and kicks her a few painkillers in response to her bloody cheek. It’s not rape; it’s what she wanted because it lets her escape to a place where she feels—for a moment, thank God—nothing at all. It’s the elusive void she keeps chasing.
In the end, Laney doesn’t find redemption, as we have come to expect from modern novels with female protagonists. But the reader will find a bittersweet kind of mercy. Out in the real world, that’s sometimes the most we can hope for.
> I Smile Back
Amy Koppelman (Two Dollar Radio), 194 Pages
