The Morbids by Ewa Ramsey review – mental illness captured with remarkable nuance and skill
The Morbids takes its title from the unofficial moniker of a therapy group that its protagonist, Caitlin, attends in a “nondescript community room in Surry Hills” on Tuesday nights, alongside a ragtag group of misfits all united by their crippling fear of death.
Each member has a favourite means of imagining their demise (“Frannie’s was cancer, Carlos’s vehicular. Louise … was expecting something violent but premeditated”); many also have a “secondary” – tsunami, train crash, bad flu. Caitlin’s primary fear she describes as “mugging gone wrong. Wrong place, wrong time type stuff … sexual violence of varying degrees optional, currently waning in frequency.”
She’s not sure that the group is helping her – the therapists change constantly and do little to direct the group, and she is not quite able to speak honestly about her life. Yet she continues to show up, in part because she sees it as being “careful” and keeping herself in check, and in part because it’s the only help she’s able to access.
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Despite the archness with which Caitlin introduces this group in the book’s opening pages, Ewa Ramsey’s depiction of its members – and of Caitlin, as she struggles with her anxiety and the effects of its underlying trauma – is finely balanced. The dry humour in Caitlin’s voice never tips over into meanness or ridicule, and Caitlin, for all of her faults, is always treated with great empathy. The Morbids, that is, is a book with great heart, and one that treats the serious mental illness at its heart in with complexity and compassion.
Caitlin is in her early 20s, living in what she calls “the cat-piss house” – a flat over a second-hand bookshop on Newtown’s main street, with a flatmate who she rarely sees – and working as a waitress in a high-end restaurant in Pyrmont. She rarely sleeps, she drinks and smokes constantly, and throws herself into her physically demanding job, where she is able – sometimes, briefly – to escape thoughts of death. Her family despairs of her (and keep asking when she will go back to her “real” career as a demographic coordinator for a social research company) and she has distanced herself from her friends.
But then a postcard arrives from her best friend Lina – whom she’s known since her school days, and with whom she once planned to travel – announcing that she is getting married in Bali and would like Caitlin to be her maid of honour. Shortly afterwards Caitlin meets Tom, a young doctor, at her restaurant’s bar, and sets off on a whirlwind romance. But both of these things Caitlin is not able to properly do – neither the travel involved in the destination wedding, nor the vulnerability and honesty that a deep relationship requires – while she is at the mercy of her illness, however much she wants to and however hard she tries.
Ramsey demonstrates a real skill in building Caitlin’s world, which is vibrant in details, and in balancing Caitlin’s disaffection with her mostly suppressed grief and loss and longing for something more. The current day narrative is interspersed – at first sporadically and then with increasing regularity as Caitlin begins to unravel – with details from her past, in sections labelled “Once”, a clever device that hints at how traumatic events become unanchored from time.
The language in these sections at times breaks down too, into fragmented sentences and repeated words and phrases, and the key events that precipitated Caitlin’s illness burst through in a similar fashion long before they’re explained to the reader. It’s also impressive how carefully Ramsey controls Caitlin’s narration of the events of the book – her very unreliability as a narrator is not clear to the reader, so complete and flawless is her perspective, until it breaks down entirely.
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This is the true achievement of The Morbids. It is a novel about mental illness that captures the experience of it, not just its narrative, with remarkable nuance and skill. It also devotes the same attention and care to after Caitlin’s breakdown, where she is trying to recover, a process that – here, as in life – is difficult and fraught, and full of ambiguities and frustrations, which makes it difficult to capture in narrative fiction.
The Morbids is also about deep and enduring friendship, and the special kind of love that this entails: it is Lina, more than any other person, who is instrumental in Caitlin’s recovery, who supports her with great patience and kindness across this entire process.
Despite its title, and the fixation on death at the core of Caitlin’s narration, The Morbids is a lively and often very funny book, and one that is hopeful and heartfelt. It is an assured debut, and a book that will mean a great deal to many people.
• The Morbids by Ewa Ramsey is out now through Allen & Unwin
