At Least at Times It Knew Me (Lucy Hannah Ryan on You Make Yourself Another)
Half Mystic Press’ new short story collection, You Make Yourself Another by Lucy Hannah Ryan, comes out on April 18. Lucy is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Her work concerns gender, sexuality, and weird bodies, inspired by lifelong chronic illness. They have had the pleasure of being featured in various publications, including Gay Times, Bullshit Lit, and Pink Plastic House. Their chapbook Death & the Maiden: Odes to the Dead Girls of Pop Culture was released by Alien Buddha Press in August 2022, and they are a reader for Sword and Kettle Press. She lives in London with her cat, Nova. To kick off the blog tour of You Make Yourself Another, Lucy joins us on the Half Mystic blog for a guest essay on the creation process of the book.
I’ve started a few drafts of this essay, trying to find the essence of what You Make Yourself Another means to me. This is a book that changes states, that tessellates, that transforms from one thing to another. This is a book five years in the making, and I cannot begin to explain how many different creatures I’ve been in that time, each year of my early twenties sluicing off of me like snakeskins. I suppose, then, that it’s only fitting for this essay to be an amalgam in its own right, shifting and hard to pin in one state.
My first idea was: You Make Yourself Another as poems inspired by each story’s first line. I found most of the first lines too finicky or plot-focused to mould into something less tangible, but one rolled out of my fingertips just sharp enough to ache right:
Amy Ran Away at the Start of That Summer
I did not dream the world in idylls. In the back alley of my mind a taxi leaked orange light against the worst of my wounding and I said, I want to leave that here. Peeled back leather and nylon, bruise and bone sunbleached into the dark surface fluttering out the window. Swathes of fine skin like thread, ringing along the road to Ariadne’s laughter. Wound unwinding, a sweet red echo, idyll and idle and idol, I said, not here, not yet, just take me a little further.
My second idea was a playlist, fitting for Half Mystic, one song for every story. But there’s not much I can say that the music doesn’t already, and who am I to outfox Stevie Nicks or Metric? Besides, how can I explain the song in the story without unveiling the mystery, spoiling all the strangeness inside? So here, for you, no filler, just music, all narrative hiding in the margins of melody.
1. “Body Ache” by Purity Ring
2. “All Mirrors” by Angel Olson
3. “don’t SAVE ME” by WILLOW
4. “Into the Night” by Z Berg
5. “South London Forever” by Florence and the Machine
6. “Video Girl” by FKA Twigs
7. “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac
And here I am, at my third draft, a monologue, a diary entry, an interview with my phone screen, trying to stitch the many pieces of patchwork together. What is You Make Yourself Another? It’s horror, grief, and wish fulfillment tangling like necklaces at the bottom of a jewellery box, in some places real snatches of my diary entries tucked in beside the fiction. I suppose You Make Yourself Another, with its title borrowed from Hamlet, is a mirror, with versions of me packed inside like silvery matryoshka dolls. And my hope through all of this is that you, dear reader, might find something here as well to reflect your shattered pasts and parts.
Who are you, really? That is the question at the heart of Lucy Hannah Ryan’s short story collection You Make Yourself Another, a visceral, tender, and elusive meditation on transformation in its many guises. Named for an insult hurled at Hamlet’s Ophelia, You Make Yourself Another blurs genre and gender lines to illuminate a state of sharp, queer flux. From a girl whose illness has her slipping between the veil of life and death to a grieving model on the path of self-destruction, from the mystery behind a teenager’s disappearance to a woman’s journey through bodily autonomy via strange metamorphosis, this collection haunts and hollows in equal measure.
For the next ten days, Half Mystic is hosting a virtual tour in collaboration with eight other blogs, journals, and newspapers featuring reviews of You Make Yourself Another, interviews with Lucy, and exclusive, never-before-seen content on the creation of the book. You Make Yourself Another is available for preorder now.