Complications in the Semic Code

I’ve struggled with reading our last book. Fear Gone Wild by Kayla Stoecklin is a nonfiction-memoir where Stoecklin narrates her husband’s mental decline and eventual suicide. She struggles to understand how these events came to happen, her life seemed perfect, why would her God do this to her family? Kayla grew up as a Christian woman and married a Christian man, Andrew, who eventually took on the position of pastor in his family’s church. 

I grew up attending church, going to Sunday School, and even receiving Confirmation. After that, I drifted away from religion and my relationship with it is waning. It was difficult for me to submit to the narrative of this novel, and allow myself to sit in the chair that Fear Gone Wild offers. I have a close relationship with mental illness, especially depression, anxiety, and suicide– the major aspects that drive the psychological aspect of this narrative. So, I can submit to parts of this novel, and it’s been an interesting experience. And it’s made writing this blog and understanding the methods through this novel difficult. 

It took me a long time, and a lot of rambling and note-taking, to come to a draft of the controlling idea. Currently, I’ve been working with the following controlling idea, Standing true in one’s faith will absolve all challenges.  And then the following counter idea, When challenged with difficulties, if one loses their faith they will crumble and suffer. When I look at them together, I see how they make sense, but they don’t feel finished. 

Let me explain them anyway. Starting with the counter idea, Stoecklin writes the narrative reflectively. There is the before Andrew’s death and the after where there is an obvious sense of learning from the narrator. In the before, Stoecklin writes about how she understood depression in the past, “I thought people with depression had a flair for the dramatic. I dumbed down depression as an excuse for laziness” (43). She let her religion teach her that depression was for people who weren’t really trying to be happy or healthy. Of course, this mentality changes. 

Then we look at the more reflective language that surrounds the controlling idea. Here, she is able to combine religion and her experiences with mental health to alter how she teaches religion. And this becomes her call to action and her purpose to write this memoir, to bring others into the perspective of mental illness and out of the prejudices and stereotypes. She very much wants to play with the rhetoric of narrative, pulling the ideal narrative audience out of the hole of the counter idea and into the light of the controlling idea. 

So what about the controlling idea and counter idea, who cares? Well, this is where genre starts to take shape. Here we’re dealing with a memoir where the narrator is not only telling a story from a major part of their life and having some call to action for readers, but it is highly reflective for the narrator. Stoecklin talks about who she was before, before she met Andrew, before his dad had cancer, before Andrew’s mental health declined, before, before, before. And these moments aren’t pretty, they don’t always paint her in an angelic glow of the doting wife. But she’s human for that and she reflects on her actions. 

In one instance, she is woken up by Andrew frantically pacing at the end of their bed in the middle of the night. He confesses that he thinks he’s having a panic attack. Stoecklin does her best to console her husband, trying to offer things to help calm him down; nonetheless, she can’t help but think, “In my exhaustion I just wanted him to stop being ‘so dramatic’ and lie back down” (20). At this moment, their family is young with young children and parenthood is exhausting. While her husband is suffering in his own way, it isn’t wrongfully selfish for Stoecklin to wish that she could go back to sleep. And she admits this. 

There’s something interesting that Fear Gone Wild does that is surprising. There are these small, almost thoughts written quickly down on paper, that read like these small poems. They begin on page 33 with one that repeats “Maybe” at the start of each line, where the lines expand in length. Then again on 47, with the repetition of “I have no idea”, at the end of 67 repeating “inhale” and “exhale,” 74 with each line ending in a question. And it keeps going throughout the novel. Each poem becomes this little seme that creates an element of the semic code. 

This code, as understood by Kaja Silverman, “represents the major device for thematizing persons, objects, or places” (251). So what are these poems doing? What are they adding to the semic code? What even is the semic code? Well, through the poems the reader enters Stoecklin’s inner thoughts. The drabbles and the hurt and the raw emotion that she feels as she watches her husband wither before her and as she also has to survive through all of this. The repetition within the poems reinforces how lost and conflicted she feels as we go through the narrative. These are her unfiltered, cathartic, thoughts. 
An ugly image starts to form as I read on and encounter these little drabbles. While they create the seme of her pain in all of this, it’s her pain. The entire narrative, whether reflective or not, is through Stoecklin’s eyes. Everything the reader knows about Andrew is created by what she writes. Are things exaggerated? Is she exploiting her husband in all her writing of this novel? Is there an issue brewing in the point of view that this book is written in, I’m starting to believe so. I almost want to ask, why is she really writing this book, is it to serve this mission of blending religion and mental health awareness? Probably. But I think there’s more lurking behind it all. Fear Gone Wild may not be my first pick for some personal, mimetic reading. But Stoecklin offers an insightful perspective into what happens when your relationship with religion is usurped by an unexpected impact of mental illness.