“‘There’s a hole in your ear!’ Carl once said. You were in his spare room, during a phase in which you weren’t going out because Carl wanted things to be home-based.”
A couple of years ago I decided it was time to stop being sad. I found a therapist who was not too far away and whose hourly rate I could just about afford. I told him that I hadn’t been able to write in such a long time – I was barely reading, barely thinking – and he suggested that I write about the sadness. I left pissed off and didn’t return; I’d never heard something so stupid. I felt nothing, and this nothing had no shape, no substance: what was there to write about? Ben Pester’s collection Am I in the Right Place? is one of the books that brought me back to literature, mostly because it is hilarious and weird and surprising, but also because it is about the nothing I had been experiencing. In ‘Lifelong Learning’, the protagonist has a hole in his ear into which half a can of Grolsch lager disappears. He escapes an awful WKD-and-Call-of-Duty party through a hole in the back of a cupboard which leads to the Village. There, he struggles to articulate the shapeless nothing of his life and hopes ‘to find someone’. ‘Because I have been alone on the limits for so long,’ Pester writes, ‘I have been in need of my friends for so long.’
First published in Am I in the Right Place?, Boiler House Press 2020
A Personal Anthology 