Brendan Mooney-AB

As someone who writes for a hobby myself, I was rather curious about this class right from the beginning. I figured that writers read differently from a normal audience that wouldn’t write. I look at books at a rather specific way myself, I tend to look at the techniques the writer uses to pour their thoughts onto the page. I try to investigate the symbolism and the themes, trying to get an idea of how they’re executed so that I can see if I can one day try a similar technique for my own work. I am happy to see that I still learned a lot from this course along with my fellow reading group members. Though we did have a strange situation where our reading group leader acted as, well the reading group leader, but also as a member of the group as other students left the class by the time we were starting to read these books. Luckily however, we were able to pull through and acquire four books to read for the class instead of having to divide up into other groups.If there was a certain topic that was mostly analyzed for the four books that my group read for the class, it would be mental health. Following Slade House, Turtles All the Way Down, and The Bell Jar, we had to read Fear Gone Wild: A Story of Mental Illness, Suicide, and Hope Through Loss by Kayla Stoecklein. All these books had a different kind of contribution to make as we were looking over the topic of mental health. With Slade House, we got to see how a character’s mental state can be used against them in a fictional setting of two soul-sucking twins. Turtles All the Way Down showed us the struggles of what it is like to live with even a not so damaging form of mental illness; it also showed us how someone struggling can still get a lot done despite the additional obstacles in their path. The Bell Jar showed us what it feels like to be trapped with the mental illness, how much harm the struggle can cause someone and how it can correlate in real life with the author. Despite all that we had been through already in the semester, and despite the grueling angst we had already dealt with, we were still not prepared for Fear Gone Wild.

Reading For:

Fear Gone Wild follows the story of the author, Kayla Stoecklein and her relationship with her husband. She spends a lot of time at the beginning of the book describing how she believed that they were the perfect couple and it was all just sunshine and rainbows. “good. Very good. I had it all. The man, the kids, the beautiful home, and even the mom car. My future was full of vibrant colors, grand adventures, and wonderful purpose—until it wasn’t. When fear crept into our home, it dimmed the lights and swiftly spread like wildfire. Our peaceful home, our predictable life, our hopeful future, all set ablaze by mental illness” (Stoecklein, 01). Obviously, it would eventually come to the part where her husband, Andrew, is diagnosed with Depression and the reader gets to see the disbelief in Stoecklein with her initial reaction. She would proceed to describe how she would try to turn to religion for a solution on how to deal with the situation. There are several instances where she cites quotes from the bible to make the scriptures relevant to her and Andrew’s predicament. Their relationship would degrade over time as she depends on religion too much as her husband is in pain. Everything would come crashing down as Andrew would eventually commit suicide and Stoecklein has no choice but to find a way to move on. She had decided that writing her book and sharing her husband’s story was the best way to do that.

When first being introduced to this book, we as a reading group had mixed feelings about it. It was a story about a wife grieving the loss of her husband and trying to find a way to heal. But there were times where we were not sympathetic towards her. None of us experienced the loss of a spouse, so this could be simply us being insensitive. McKee has a lot to say in that regard, especially in his chapter”Structure and Meaning. He says “Aristotle approached the question of the story and meaning in this way. Why is it, he asked, when we see a dead body in the street, we have one reaction, but when we read death in Homer, or see it in the theatre, we have another?” We as the readers of Stoecklein’s book are not witnessing the suicide of Andrew, we are simply reading about it in a written recreation of the events that played out. We could be expected to give the reaction as we would if we were to see a dead body out in the street, but instead we are giving the reaction as if we are witnessing death in a theatre; because of that, we would be showing less sympathy towards Stoecklein, and Andrew as a whole and that could easily be affecting us.

After all, by this point, we had already read the story of a couple of soul-sucking twins that killed people over the course of several decades. It is not the first time we would have read about death in the semester and it could simply be us being desensitized to the entire notion. As McKee would say it: “Because in life idea and emotion come separately. Mind and passions resolve in different spheres of our humanity, rarely coordinated, usually at odds.” It would be easy to dismiss our unsympathetic reaction towards the book as this, but just isn’t that simple. We as the group had several discussions about this book and all agreed that we had all felt bad for Andrew and his situation.

However, at the same time, we did not have that same sympathy for Stoecklein. We did feel bad in the sense that she lost her husband to suicide and is trying to move on. However, the idea that she would write a book about his death and earn a profit from it left a poor taste in our mouths. We felt that it was more exploitive than how we originally saw the book. It was after these discussions where we started to become more of the insecure resistant readers than anything. We couldn’t help but question the motives of Stoecklein as she went further on with her story.

To her credit, with the way she wrote the story, she convinced us that the events she wrote about were honest depictions of what had taken place. That mostly has to do with the fact that we were distasteful towards how she would treat Andrew while he had the mental illness. “But we lost the days of predictability when the panic attacks started and now depression? […] I hardly recognized him” (Stoecklein, 42). When he was first diagnosed, she was in disbelief that not only was the man with depression her husband, but she couldn’t even recognize the man as they sat next to each other in the car.

There were several instances where Andrew would be in great emotional pain and would clearly have needed her comfort and Stoecklein just had completely dismissive reactions and simply prayed to God silently hoping it would all end. “‘What do you mean a ‘creature’? Andrew, what are you talking about? There isn’t anything in the shower. You were the only one in here; I don’t understand.’ He started crying again and shaking. I wasn’t helping. I was making it worse. So I did the only thing I knew to do—I prayed. ‘God, I don’t know what’s going on, but I pray your presence would overwhelm this room right now. Whatever Andrew saw, I pray in the name of Jesus for it to leave; it has no power here. In Jesus’ mighty name, amen’” (Stoecklein, 72). In a grimmer sense, it did end, just not in the way she would have wanted. However, the story doesn’t end with Andrew’s suicide, that is simply the climax, she tries to describe how she heals to move on and turns more towards religion. By this point, we as a group were tired of how dependent she was on religion and hoped that Andrew’s suicide would have been a wake-up call. However, that never happened, and we were once again leaving the book with a bitter taste.

Form & Genre:

The way that Stoecklein treats her husband Andrew while he is struggling with his mental illness is shocking to say the least. One of the reasons why she wrote this book was to spread the awareness of depression, as well as spreading the awareness of a way to cope with it. For Stoecklein, she firmly believes that turning towards religion is a legitimate way to make one’s own mental health easier, and to help ease the pain of being trapped in one’s own negative thoughts and self-hatred. McKee mentions the goal of the writer in his chapter, “Structure and Meaning” “The audience must not just understand; it must believe. You want the world to leave your story convinced that yours is a truthful metaphor to life. And the means by which you bring the audience to your point of view resides in the very design you give your telling.” To apply this to Stoecklein and her book, she obviously wants the audience to believe that religion is a good way to deal with depression. She is supposed to use her writing to convince the audience that Christianity is a good idea for someone with depression to use in order to treat themselves to recover.

It is easy for her to make herself seem good before opening the text, that much is true. When looking at her little biography in the book, we as the group realized that she had a Bachelor’s in psychology. With that in mind, one might expect to receive a more educated approach about the way she would react towards her husband. We were also expecting useful insights on mental health in general and how religion can be used as an anchor to help one heal and treat themselves as a solution if they couldn’t find anything else. In a sense, we as the audience were tricked by her outward appearance when looking at this book at first. We were approaching this book, expecting to see a psychologist explain how religion can be used as a tool to help treat a patient, and to help them get involved in self-improvement. That was not at all what we had received when reading from this book.

It could have been an interesting take on mental illness given that it was coming from the perspective of someone who does not struggle with it herself. As over the course of the semester, the books that we’ve read when it came to the topic of mental illness, it would come from the perspective of someone struggling with a specific mental illness showing what life is like to live with that diagnosis. This was going to be a different perspective, and presumably an educated one at that. However, instead we got the perspective of someone who stubbornly clings to religion as her husband suffers, puts in the bare minimum of effort to help him and is shocked that it wasn’t enough to save him. Not only that, but once again, she is making money from his death by writing about his story.

Intertextual Codes:

There were a lot of moments when Stoecklein would ask rhetorical questions that weren’t addressed to anyone at all. “The word suicide has become a taboo in our society. Instead of talking about it openly and freely, it is something we keep private and tucked away. Why is there so much shame and fear surrounding suicide? And what can we do to change it?” (Stoecklein, 90). She isn’t necessarily breaking the fourth wall and asking the audience a question, rather she is posing a question to get a better look at her perspective.

These kinds of questions mostly appear either during or after an interaction she has had with Andrew in the story, mostly during the pivotal events that show both of their characters. “But how do we know whose voice we are listening to? How do we know if the still, small whisper is God or the Enemy?” (Stoecklein, 77). In this instance, she talks about a supposed enemy inside of our own minds. It would be a manifestation of our own inner demons and these voices in our head would be intentionally causing us both mental and emotional pain. She is openly sharing her thoughts both in the moment and while she writes the book. It is in these moments that she has convinced me that she had tried to record the events of her marriage in the most honest way possible. That, and the interactions she had with Andrew. In a way, she is showing me not just her side of the story, she is showing me her truth, what I should consider the truth as she tells it.

This plays very much into the semic code of all the intertextual codes. By sharing her thoughts, she is attempting to show her perspective to the audience in an objective manner, or at least trying to portray it that way. Silverman talks about this as well in her own text about the semic code. “The fragmentation of the semic field fosters the illusion that the ‘truth’ precedes the enunciation, and the character exceeds the sum total of its attributes.” It shows that Stoecklein shares her thoughts in an attempt to convince us that everything she writes is the truth and told in an objective manner. She is trying to show the reader that these moments where we get to look inside her mind that these are her raw emotions in the moment.

I’m not the only one to notice this either. Angelina mentions this very thing in Complications in the Semic Code. Angelina takes it a step further when she talks about how these “little drabbles” take away from the rhetoric of Stoecklein’s book. It is supposed to be as much of a story about Andrew as it is supposed to be about herself. However, even in the moments where Andrew is the one struggling and the one who needs the comfort, she takes those moments and makes it about herself instead. Rather than talking about how hard it was to help Andrew deal with the pain and how she would do what she can to help him, she would talk about where his panic attacks would be an inconvenience for her. There’s even a moment where he is in the middle of having one of these attacks and all she can do is go back to bed and think about how he is taking away time for her to sleep. It is like we as the audience while we sympathize with Andrew and his pain, are supposed to feel bad for her because Andrew’s depression and panic attacks act as an inconvenience for her. “The ripple effect of suicide is terribly destructive, but can suicide really be considered selfish? The main question I received after Andrew’s suicide was, “How could he do that to his family?” It’s a question I ask myself all the time because the Andrew I knew would never have wanted to cause me, the boys, our family, or our church pain. The Andrew I knew loved his life” (Stoecklein, 99). At the beginning of the book, she was talking about how everything was fine and dandy, and how their marriage was just absolutely perfect. However, Andrew struggling with a mental illness takes away from that idea of hers, it takes away from the image she created of the relationship. So, she is trying to convince us as the audience that the image she created about their relationship is the truth and that Andrew’s depression is an obstacle in the path of that image. We are supposed to want her to help Andrew not because of any obligation or empathy towards him, but so that she can continue to live in her fantasy that everything about her life is great.

Rhetoric of Narrative:

While reading this book, I did not become the ideal type of audience for Stoecklein. Rabinowitz describes the two kinds of typical readers that appear when reading the stories, calling them the authorial audience and the narrative audience. “To the extent that our joining the authorial audience is a pretense, we are much less likely to receive the work’s intended effect. But the pretense involved in joining the narrative audience does not interfere with a novel’s effect; it is, on the contrary, an essential and desirable element in it.” The narrative audience is meant to take the author at the word and be pulled into the world of the book, as if they were an actual existing being within that world. Everything that the author intended for the reader to feel worked out perfectly with the narrative audience, and everything went as planned. That is not the case with the authorial audience, they cannot be so easily convinced or pulled into the world of the book. The intended effect that the writer had planned did not work on them, and so they give off different kinds of unexpected reactions when reading the text.

If I were to guess what the narrative audience for Fear Gone Wild were to look like, I would not expect it to be people who see themselves as Kayla Stoecklein. She is a unique individual that not everyone can relate to. Instead, I believe that the narrative audience would be Christian and takes their religion very seriously. They would have to agree that she did everything she could to help her husband and would have to truly believe that simply having faith would be enough to help him.

As someone who leans towards the authorial audience more, I have to simply disagree with the notion that religion would have been enough to help him. The man was already a pastor, if anything, that makes him more involved in the religion than Stoecklein herself. However, I have to take myself to a step even further than that. Stoecklein has a bachelor’s in psychology, that alone would mean that the cultural codes would have me take her words more to heart. I would have to believe that she is knowledgeable in how to help Andrew and that she did everything she could, making the best effort she can to help him. However, I simply did not see that in the events that she deigned to tell the reader about. Again, there were several instances where he had panic attacks and all she could do was talk about how it was an inconvenience for her and how she left it to God to sort things out. I am supposed to believe that this effort was enough to help him when it obviously didn’t. When not doing that, she would go completely off the rails and add stories or verses from the bible trying to connect it to her situation. “Just like Andrew, we see heroes of our faith struggle with the darkness of their minds all throughout Scripture: • David wrote in a psalm, ‘How long, LORD ? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?’ (Ps. 13:1–2)” (Stoecklein, 101).In the end, he still kills himself and all anyone gets out of it is Stoecklein trying to convince everyone that she did her best to help him. This is all while she is selling numerous copies of that type of coping to turn a profit. I simply see it as her not putting in enough effort to help her husband and exploiting his suicide for money. I would like to chalk it up to us just simply refusing to give into the ideas presented by Stoecklein and that we would be interpreting it incorrectly. But, every time I think that, I can’t help but think back to how she has a degree in psychology and despite that knew nothing about how to help her husband and at multiple times came off as insensitive and made it about herself.

Conclusion:

Fear Gone Wild does not at all seem like a story of hope through loss or healing. It feels much more like Kayla Stoecklein trying to explain her actions throughout Andrew’s story, and trying to justify her thoughts and beliefs. She is just as much writing this book for herself as she is for other people. However, looking at her thoughts and her actions towards Andrew in the story, I simply cannot trust her as a person. I can’t really trust her as an author, if there was any trust, it would be as a narrator, but only because she really made herself look bad. It’s hard to say if she is an unreliable narrator given how she really doesn’t paint herself in a flattering picture. She does share her general thoughts, and it seems to not matter if they make her look good or bad, the same goes for her actions. I believe that she was being honest when she was recounting the events of her marriage that lead up to Andrew’s suicide. However, I can’t help but question the motivations she has for sharing a book such as this.

I myself struggle with depression and have been working on healing myself and trying to improve my life over the years. For what it’s worth, I do believe that if someone with depression were to turn to religion to help themselves, I would believe that it could help them. After all, I myself find it hard to have faith in people and in myself, if faith in God and faith for his love for everyone would heal me, I would be all for it. That’s what I was expecting when I found this book online when asked to choose one for my group. We were all supposed to choose books that we haven’t read before, and looking at the description of the other books that the other group members chose to read over the course of the semester, I knew the main focus of our group was going to be on mental health and on mental illness. That’s why I had decided when I would look for books online that I haven’t read yet, the book would have that same topic in mind. The book left a poor taste in my mouth, and it wasn’t just me, it was the entire group. Through all our conversations over this book, it was us talking about how incompetent she was at helping her husband. That poor taste leads us to question her motives in writing this book. If I were to go back in time and go over which books to choose, again, I would have probably looked for a different book entirely. Suffice to say, I can’t say that Kayla Stoecklein really helped me as someone who struggles from the same mental illness as her husband. Quite honestly, I can’t even say that I’m surprised that someone like her would lead a depressed man to suicide, as she is simply not helpful or supportive as much as she thinks she is.

case closed in red stamp style, stamped on white background

Reflection:

This course had definitely shown me a lot more than I would have ever expected. When it comes to the Writing Arts core value 1: “Writing Arts students will demonstrate understanding of a variety of genre conventions and exhibit rhetorical adaptability in applying those conventions.” I feel like that being placed in a reading group really helped with that. I don’t think I would have understood even half of the things that were taught in class if it weren’t for these groups. I was able to discuss the several terms I was shown with the others who were about as confused as I was. But the more we discussed the rhetoric, or the controlling and the counter ideas, the more we got a better understanding of not only what these terms mean, but how to apply them to the text that we were supposed to read. I also believe that working with these reading groups helped a lot with me creating all the blog posts I had to do over the course of the semester. Discussing it with Andrew Kopp was helpful, but also discussing it with the group, we were able to convey the lessons and discuss them in such a way where I could understand it and where I wouldn’t struggle as much. I have to admit, the course was intimidating at the beginning of the semester, given how it was the only course I had that had its own discord server dedicated to it. But the server itself was also helpful and an easy way for us as the students to connect with each other and get questions answered. It certainly does a better job at that than a classroom setting. That is not to say that I do not enjoy or miss going to the classrooms. In fact, the reason I was put into group 5 was because we were the group that were most interested in having in-person meetings during the Covid-19 pandemic.

I want to take the time to give a personal shoutout to Angelina, our group leader. Because of the unique situation going on with our group, she had to engage with us both as a group leader and a member of the group. Suffice to say, we as a group had a different experience from everyone else over the course of the semester, but it was fun, and I’m happy that I got to take part in it.

We all as a group had a hard time getting through Kayla Stoecklein’s work, but we managed to pull through. Quite frankly, while it was the worst book we had read for the whole semester, it was the one where we got engaged with each other the most. The most fun conversations we had were talking about how much we disliked this book and how we couldn’t wait to be done with it. So, with that, I’d also like to give a shoutout to Paige and Sierra too for being able to slug through this book with me. Though the book itself was not enjoyable, all of us talking about how we disliked it was.

When it comes to the second core value of Writing Arts: “Writing Arts students will understand theories of writing and reading and be able to apply them to their own writing.” I feel as if this course did help me get a better understanding of how to approach my own work. It will certainly be easier for me to recognize and describe what I am aiming to do with my works in the future. It certainly gave me a better idea on how to use the controlling and counter ideas, and it painted a clear picture to me of what kinds of readers I should expect when I share my work. “To showcase a controlling idea, Kayla attempts to show how Andrew was seeking help for himself. Of course he was getting medication, seeking professional help, but he had also decided to turn to religion for help as well. […] While it is helpful for someone with depression to seek a therapist and get medication to treat their mental illness. None of it is going to really help unless the depressed person tries to help themselves as well. For Andrew, Kayla believed that the way he could help himself was through religion. It is a legitimate hobby as any, and it can help those to cope. However, that doesn’t mean that Andrew is out of the woods yet, there is still the counter idea.” (Blog 1). I would have had a much harder time with identifying these ideas before, and it would have been much harder for me to try to put myself into the mind of either the author or a specific audience. At least now, I can have a better idea with how I want to structure my work in the future.

When it comes to the third core value of Writing Arts: “Writing Arts students will demonstrate the ability to critically read complex and sophisticated texts in a variety of subjects. ” This course has definitely helped me as an English major. It has given me a better idea of how to approach my close reading and it helped me realize what I should look for when analyzing the text. “I wanted to get a better understanding of how to analyze the semic code in the story, and to do that, I had to apply an analysis to myself as a reader. I found myself asking ‘what would be a seme for me?’ Taking a closer look at the readings in our reading group this semester, in terms of me as a reader, I would have to say part of my personal semic code would be studying the struggles of mental illness. The reason why I feel this is because in today’s society, mental illness has become a widespread discussion and there has been a large amount of encouragement to further study the issue. Mental illness itself has a significant impact on my culture and me as an individual, after all, why else would we be reading so many books about it?” (Blog 3). I can say with confidence that this course has made me both a better reader and a better writer. I feel like that with moments like this, when I analyze a story, I like to dissect it to try to understand what the author is going for, what themes they wanted to include, what emotions they wanted to convey, what thoughts they wanted to get from the reader. I feel that thanks to this class, it’s really sharpened that skill.

Kayla Stoecklein might not be the best at conveying her message or making herself look good. However, I can at least say that she has painted a clear picture of what not to do as a writer.

Inventory:

https://readinglistbygroup5.wordpress.com/2020/12/01/inventory-and-reflection/

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin:

Blog 1: https://readinglistbygroup5.wordpress.com/2020/09/13/practice-blog-1-whats-at-stake-for-you/ -Comment

Blog 2: https://readinglistbygroup5.wordpress.com/2020/09/15/blog-post-2/ -Comment

Blog 3: https://readinglistbygroup5.wordpress.com/2020/09/17/what-are-the-intertextual-codes-in-giovanni-room/ -Comment

Blog 4: https://readinglistbygroup5.wordpress.com/2020/09/22/the-dichotomy-of-acceptance/ -Blog

Slade House:

Blog 1: https://readinglistbygroup5.wordpress.com/2020/09/29/beginning-to-open-doors-in-slade-house/ -Comment

Blog 2: https://readinglistbygroup5.wordpress.com/2020/10/01/mysterious-case-of-ivy-and-fox-pins/ -Comment

Blog 3: https://readinglistbygroup5.wordpress.com/2020/10/05/a-battle-of-wit-and-the-sexes/ -Comment

Blog 4: https://readinglistbygroup5.wordpress.com/2020/10/08/temptations-of-the-reader/ -Blog