Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness

by Heather Fowler

Heather Fowler’s fourth collection of fiction speaks the language of need. Desperate, obsessive, even demented need—both emotional and erotic—is voiced by characters ill or ill-advised. From cyber to stalker, illicit, explicit, tender and tedious, the relationships in Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness translate love and lust into disorder. How we hear our own need and the way it sounds to others proves in these enthralling stories an imperfect but utterly captivating conversation, a destructive yet dynamic discourse between well-being and disease, images and words.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

296 pages, Paperback

First published February 22, 2014

About the author

Heather Fowler is a poet, a fiction writer, a playwright, and a novelist. She is the author of the novel Beautiful Ape Girl Baby (2016) and the story collections Suspended Heart (2010, 2nd edition 2019), People with Holes (2012), This Time, While We're Awake (2013), and Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness (2014). Fowler’s People with Holes was named a 2012 finalist for Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction. Her fictive work has been made into fine art in several instances and her collaborative poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging, written with Meg Tuite and Michelle Reale, is the winner of the 2013 TWIN ANTLERS PRIZE FOR COLLABORATIVE POETRY released in December of 2014. Fowler has published stories and poems online and in print in the U.S., England, Australia, and India, and had work appear in such venues as PANK, Night Train, storyglossia, Surreal South, Feminist Studies, and more, as well as having been nominated for the storySouth Million Writers Award, Sundress Publications Best of the Net, and Pushcart Prizes. She is Poetry Editor at Corium Magazine.
Please visit her website here: www.heatherfowler.com

Reviews

[Shaindel · Rating 5 out of 5]

My blurb from the back cover:

The stories in Heather Fowler’s Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness span time and space, sanity and insanity, our dreams and our nightmares. From Renaissance Italy to the French Revolution to the modern dangers of Facebook stalkers, Fowler’s characters explore all of the pleasures and pains of love, that “monster…forged from both hope and desire.” Fowler takes risks; each story is a spellbinding journey. I can’t think of a short story collection I’m more excited to recommend this year.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

review to come

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes a feel a great depth of sadness in accepting the fact that there are many wonderful writers I will one day end my reading life never having even heard about, let alone read. I am very glad that Heather Fowler will not be among them. There are seventeen delightfully disturbed and disturbing stories in the latest of her four collections of short stories (I hope to read them all in 2014). All are first rate and some just amazed me. Heather Fowler loves the short story and it shows in her work.

I find posting on collections of short stories a very daughting and challenging task. Reviewers (which I am not, I just read stuff and post on it) seek overriding themes and concerns over different works often first written with no plan to place together in a collection.

In the past I have used a kind of forest metaphor to describe collections of short stories. Some forests are perfect for a weekend in a cottage, others for exploring the tropics. I see the forest of the stories of Fowler as not far from a once great civilization, now on its final stage of collapse into anarchy and chaos. Few of the residents, and almost none of the elite classes have any sense of this. Mental illnesses becomes the norm, plagues take hold, the poor begin to lust for vengence, the affluent seek escape in sensation. In the wake of this some begin to retreat to the forest, but for many who flee it is too late.

In posting on collections of short stories i like to talk enough about the individual stories in the collection to give potential readers a feel for the book. After doing this, normally I attempt to generalize about the book as I will do that here. My bottom line is a total endorsement of Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness to all lovers of the form, especially those with a fondness for the darker side of life.

"The Hand Licker"

"The Hand Licker" leads of the collection with a powerful tale of a mentally ill man who has not taken his meds for several days. Evan imagines that he sees his ex-girlfriend, Sharon, in other people and even in objects. We are there when he is lectured by his social worker and told if he acts out again he risks going back to jail. In a really well depicted incident he he in a fast food place and he imagines Sharon is in the food of an old lady. He approaches her and begins to seek communication with Sharon through her food. The incident does not end well. We see some of the roots of his issues in what we learn of his father. His father told him you pay women like Sharon and kick them out when done. In a scene that tells so much with so little, we learn what Evan did to a tapestry from the 16th century, for which he paid thousands of dollars. Evan took revenge on his father for years of abuse. I will leave the incident untold so you can marvel at it as I did. Perhaps the story has a kind of happy ending, or at least a turn upward, and I won't spoil it for you.

"Losing Married Women"

"I am an unrepentant harvester of other people’s marriages."

"Losing Married Women" is a very intriguing and entertaining story about a predatory lesbian. Told in the first person, it is the story of how the narrator seduced a married woman, ruined her marriage and then discarded her. The narrator has a keen sense about when the love has gone dry in a woman's marriage and she knows how to move in for the kill. In this case the woman was a neighbor in her forties. It started over a pitcher of daiquiris. "Losing Married Women" is an acutely observed slightly voyeristic story I throughly enjoyed reading.

"Blood, Hunger, Child"

Set in Paris in 1789 at the start of the reign of Terror, it is the story of an ex-whore, her lover whose face was melted in a fire. They have one child. They love to see the heads of aristocrats fall, taking vicarious vengence with each execution. As I read this story i was reminded of the old woman in A Tale of Two Cities who never missed a guillotining. Fowler lets us see how the terrible conditions under which the narrator lived made her take joy in death. We know this a consuming flame in which she will also be destroyed and I think she does not much care. There is an interesting plot I will let you discover.





"Con Yola"




"Con Yola" is a story I found personally very disturbing. If were not my great luck to be married to a wonderful woman that sort of anchors me in sanity, I could be very like the central character in this story. The man is a middle aged academic, never married, with a very strange toooo bonded relationship with a doll he stole from a child, though he tells us he did pay her. The doll is ugly, he keeps it on a shelve and likes to fondle and caress the doll. He has cleaning ladies come in to work on his place. The latest one, a Latin heritage woman, has the same skin tone as his doll. He begins coming home to watch her clean. Then he pays her $700.00 a month to live in a cottage on his property, he is quite affluent. One day he enters the cottage and the woman figures OK he pay be crazy but this is good money and he seems to want sex so she accommodates him. He begins to regularly sleep with her and she raises her fee to $1000.00 a month. He notices that she is repositioning his doll to reflect their sexual activities of the night before. His world and that of the cleaning lady are very different. There is a terribly painfull but quite hilarious close to the story which I will leave untold. I felt the man's pain and was glad that is not me but I acknowledge it might have been.

"Good Country. People"




I think maybe you do need to know Flannery O'Connors story "Good Country People" to fully relish the wonderfully macabre take on the story done by Fowler in "Good Country People. Like O'Connor's story it is set in the rural south of America among country people. In O'Connor's story the central female character has a prosthetic leg and a PhD in Philosophy. In Fowler's she has a club like artificial hand and has maybe been to the third grade. In both stories the same predatory bible salesman @thereadinglife: The Reading Life: Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness - Collec... http://t.co/hb4N5biLLGplays a big part. I just can't tell more of this story which I hope you will have the pleasure of reading.


"Mother's Angels"

Set in Florence, Italy in 1348 in the worst times of the plague that killed almost half the people of Italy "Mother's Angels" is an account of the attempt by a woman and her daughter to escape the city. I think historic short stories are harder to do than novels as you have less time to set out the background but in this and "Blood, Hunger, Child" Fowler pulls it off with great skill. People did not really know what caused the plague. It changed everything and all relations. It reminded me of Daniel Defoe's great book A Journal of the Plague Years. The mother has a blind pet cat she cherishes and her spirit is broken when the cat must be left. It was just heartbreakingly sad for me when the mother imagined as they relocated that she heard the cat crying out for her. This is a beautiful story about a terrible time.

"The Gray Fairy"




Several of Fowler's stories are about those with serious mental illnesses. I have long been interested in fairies, spirit creatures and such. I think part of my interest in Irish literature arises from the affinity of the Irish for such figures. The story "Con Yola" is in a way about a dark fairy in the form of a fetishized doll. Of course talking about seeing fairies is not a good idea at job interviews and such but is this a seeing into worlds beyond the mundane or is it a manifestation of personal issues. Belief in occult entities often shows up in defeated cultures and marginalized people, maybe it is the refuge of the half lost. In this story, as you can see in the marvelous sample of Fowler's exquisite prose, the fairy is either an actual malevolent entity or it is how the girl refuse her trauma. I found this a very exciting work and will leave it unspoiled.

There are ten more very diverse stories in the collection. Most deal with people pushed by pain, by needs hard to understand, by strange compulsions.


From the publisher's webpage

"Heather Fowler’s fourth collection of fiction Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental speaks the language of need. Desperate, obsessive, even demented need—both emotional and erotic—is voiced by characters ill or ill-advised. From cyber to stalker, illicit, explicit, tender and tedious, the relationships in Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness translate love and lust into disorder. How we hear our own need and the way it sounds to others proves in these enthralling stories an imperfect but utterly captivating conversation, a destructive yet dynamic discourse between well-being and disease, images and words."

[Meg Tuite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness by Heather Fowler is 16 stories that ‘cross unseen barriers’ created by a world that pretends these characters are far-removed from our existence: the obsessions, the phobias, the voices. Fowler exposes the fraudulence of our so-called ‘sanity’ in every one of these stories by revealing scars, secrets, traumas through characters that are not only familiar, but familial: humanity masked behind drapes.

“They made their lives with monotony. She ached for something new. I stole in, invisible, as I always do. It is easy to steal a heart unguarded, as easy as opening an unlocked door. I watched her and touched her–expecting nothing.”

“Blood drenched our fields. It made us see red. The poor would not wait.”

Fowler wisks us smoothly through the 12th century to the present to remind us that ‘then and now,’ are interchangeable with judgment, death sentence, class issues, vengeance and the lust to dominate someone just beyond our reach.

This is a powerful collection that doesn’t flinch from domination and hierarchy of society’s sociopaths who live without conscience, require a recipe of ignorance, narcissism and a world that condones the behavior in order to overpower and find a ‘reason to be’ through pain and paralysis of others:

“She wouldn’t call these intrusions rape exactly. More like a strange penetration, the desire of which she never mirrored.”

“Sometimes she thought of her mother and visualized a needle coming up and through the stretched canvas embroidery, then down again. The wood that circled its perimeter held down her tight stitches, and she imagined herself as the canvas. Celine was always stretching. First for this one, then the next.”

And yes, there is empowerment blasting through Fowler’s characters: enter Treble Ann up against Bible-boy:

“I’m gonna do it,” he said. “I’m gonna do whatever I want, girl. Because I ain’t like anybody else. I take what I want, and now I want you.”

Treble Ann works Bible-boy like an instrument after he attempts to rape her:

“...she took him down in three blows, ducking his attempts to hit her. She hadn’t had a real tussle in a long time and couldn’t quite explain the anger that swelled within her as she touched him, made her want to hit him more and more, even after he stopped fighting.”

Fowler’s stories reach not only through centuries, but through all facets of what it is to be human without letting us forget that we are animals. Mammals that don’t attack in order to survive, but survive in order to attack.

Heather Fowler’s writing is inimitable and unforgettable. As in her other collections, she fearlessly storms through uncharted waters. Get a copy!

[Mark Folse · Rating 5 out of 5]

While Fowler never hesitates to take us to the edge of psycho-sexual madness, "The Handlicker" surprises us by morphing into a beautiful love story, and "Speak To Me With Tenderness Howard Sun" captures the madness of our obsession with social media and the danger of stalking masterfully. There is a darkness here that is closer to a 21st century P.K. Dick than to the magical realism of 20th Century Latin America. She is closer to Cortazar and Murakami than to the Latin roots of the genre, with a healthy dose of Dick's cynicism into the mix. And while I invoke P.K.D and "Good Country. People" is a violent rape revenge tale, several of the stories end tenderly. If any of those authors' names are buzzwords for you, rush to read her. I regret buying the Kindle edition. I can't really study the accompanying illustrations by Pablo Vision. I think I'm going to need a hard copy as well.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heather Fowler is good, damn good. Follow her.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness, Heather Fowler
Queen’s Ferry Press
978-1-938466-28-1
Submitted by the publisher
$18.95, 268 pgs

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” Francis Bacon

Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness is Heather Fowler’s fourth collection of short fiction. These seventeen stories run the gamut from (mostly) benign eccentricity to psychosis, between normal human lunacy and bat-shit crazy, and give a nod to the circumstances and environments that contribute to each. I was eagerly anticipating this collection because short stories are my favorite form of literature and, come on, is that the best title EVER, or what?

The collection begins with “The Hand-Licker,” in which we are introduced to Evan, schizophrenic and off his meds, for whom time is not linear and who is haunted and harassed by the memory of a former girlfriend, Sharon. Sharon’s face has a habit of animating inanimate objects, her voice issuing forth to taunt Evan. The title of this story refers to Evan’s compulsion to lick women in whose hands Sharon’s face appears. He desperately wants not to return to jail and to avoid commitment but the meds render him dull and his world duller, a gray wash superimposed over a world that, without the intervention of the drugs, is Crayola-bright. The trade is unacceptable.

Our second story, “Losing Married Women,” begins with one of the best opening sentences I’ve read: “I am an unrepentant harvester of other people’s marriages.” It’s a disturbing sentiment and as such has accomplished its task: the feeling conjured is at once fascinating and repellent, sort of like the proverbial train wreck. Unfortunately the story evokes nothing after that first promising sentence.

“Speak to Me with Tenderness, Howard Sun” is perhaps the most satisfying tale. Howard and Lisa are coworkers who are attracted to each other but Howard has the social skills of an eight-year-old child. For instance, this is how he invites Lisa to a football game: “I have two tickets,” he said. “Want one?” Howard communicates mainly with mixed tapes and poetry; said poems he copies and leaves at Lisa’s desk for her to find. Things get progressively stranger as Howard begins creating alternate personas on Facebook in a campaign to get to know Lisa without having to actually talk to her – a “thought-tryst.” As Lisa’s therapist muses, “…Howard Sun is a person with either extreme fear, extreme mental illness, or extreme cruelty. But which is it?” This is an excellent question. This story is a brilliant exploration of the effects of social media. Does the pseudo-anonymity allow us to be more our true selves or does it render personal intimacy ever more difficult?

Two of these stories strike me as particularly relevant on this day as I listen to news reports of a monster in California who decided that many anonymous women must die because a couple of individual women had rejected his attentions. Apparently any woman can serve as a stand-in for any other woman because we function in this society as symbol, rather than individual – we are “other,” without personhood; we are denied agency and viewed as vessels for anything that needs stowing: love, babies, ideals, hopes, opinions, religions, insecurities, prejudices, hatreds. “Ever,” the first story in this category, is a classic tale of obsession, of stalking, inevitably escalating to its logical conclusion in which the narrator asks the question, “If a woman falls in the woods with no one around to see her, does she make a sound?” The second story is “Tiger Man.” Terry and Jane are none-too-gracefully handling their marital problems. Terry comes across a book titled City Men, Emasculated. It espouses the usual cliché about hunters being denied their essential purpose, blah blah blah. Terry’s friend eloquently expounds on the premise.

“Women,” Frank said. “They want you to be Mr. Sensitive, then Tarzan. Tarzan, Mr. Sensitive, Tarzan, Mr. Sensitive. No matter which way you go, you’re screwed. Go caveman, and you get: A sexist pig, outmoded, and an overt representation of ‘the man.’ Go sensitive flower, and you’re emasculated for not being a bodice-ripping Fabio. Women inspire personality disorders.”

Why is this an either/or proposition? Is a healthy balance too much to ask? Are men congenitally incapable of complexity? They are not, after all, amoebae. Reviewing my notes on this story reveals that I have written, “Women suck. Boo hoo.” Terry would do better to read On Origin of Species. Adapt or let your bloodline die out.

Unfortunately, this volume disappoints. The uneven quality is distracting. I was heartened time and again by a promising beginning and then more often than not frustrated by lack of follow-through, as if the story was incomplete. On the other hand, there is definite promise here. Ms. Fowler is a talented chameleon, moving between time periods, languages, and cultures rather effortlessly: from revolutionary France in “Blood, Hunger, Child” to plague-ridden Florence in “Mother’s Angels” to the call-and-response revival-inflected rhythms of the American South in a satisfying homage to Flannery O’Connor titled “Good Country. People.” Note the use of punctuation in the title of that piece. That “period” is important. This book is visually arresting. It features original artwork, “A Cabinet of Curiosities,” created by Pablo Vision especially for each of these stories.

Heather Fowler’s previous stories have been nominated, and won, awards. People With Holes (Pink Narcissus Press, July 2012) was a finalist for Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award in short fiction. Individual stories have been nominated for storySouth Million Writers Award and a Pushcart Prize. This leads me to believe that maybe Elegantly Naked isn’t her best work. In that spirit, I’m going to read some of her earlier work and report back. Stay tuned.

[The Word Count · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few books have a lifelong impact on its readers, and Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness is a gripping collection of stories not soon to be forgotten!

Fowler crafted 17 chilling stories with characters that are full-bodied and real. Each story takes you through a captivating journey with a disparate set of people who suffer from different mental illnesses.

Though some of these tales appear to be purely experimental for Fowler, they are still jarring, well fleshed-out, and wonderfully layered.

Fowler's transfixing, graceful, and robust voice captured me from the first page, and I was utterly dismayed when I reached the back cover.

Elegantly Naked... has earned a place on my "favorite books" list and I am leaving this review eagerly and voluntarily.

[Odessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kept me reading!!! Pulled me along and let me look through Fowler's lens at some mental health issues I didn't even realize I had interest in understanding more thoroughly. Definitely thought provoking, as is all of her work that I've read thus far.

My recommendation? Go buy all of her work you can get your hands on!!! I ADORE this author!

[Isa · Rating 5 out of 5]

favorites: "good country. people.," "losing married women," "ever," "speak to me with tenderness, howard sun," "the scene you come upon is madness," "the hand-licker"

[LITREAL · Rating 5 out of 5]

Check out Heather Fowler's Interview at LITREAL
https://youtu.be/m9wRnLN9rtg

[Mikelkpoet · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness.”
A Review by Mikel K

The title of this book was enough to raise curiosity in me and make me want to read it: “Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness.” Was this book about sex? Was it about mental illness?

Had the author come to some correlation between the two of them? It turns out that the book is a collection of eighteen amazing short stories, mostly bizarre in some fashion or other, all titillating and fun.



In the first story, “The Handlicker,” the protagonist, a guy named Evan, is good in bed, but he is not too good mentally. This is the story where the book gets its title from. According to Evan he “he picked a woman’s pussy better than a thief did a lock.” The love of Evan’s life has blown him off as the story gets started, but the story has a happy ending when Evan finds new love in the library with a blind gal. “I would like you to tell me when to take my medicine,” Evan says to his new lover.



“Losing Married Women,” is the story of a gay woman who speciailizes in picking up married women.



“Speak To Me With Tenderness Howard Sun,” Is the story of a woman of a man and a woman who work in the same office. The man seems to have a crush on the woman, even creating multiple Facebook personalities to contact her through. Lisa gets tired of Howard’s mamby pamby courting of her and comes right out and asks him if he wants to sleep with her. She never sees Howard again and misses him madly.



“Taking Celine,” is a weird and uncomfortable story about Celine who is getting banged regularly by Harry. Celine is a patient in a mental hospital and Harry is her shrink. Author Heather Fowler has a very vivid and crazed mind!



“Blood, Hunger, Child,” is another uncomfortable story about a woman whose baby is still born, and since the mother and her lover are starving to death, she decides to cook the dead baby. Heather, where do you get these ideas?!



“Ever,” hits close to reality. Caroline Light is frantic because she is being stalked by an ex-boyfriend and no one will believe her. The ex slits her throat.



“Con Vola,” is a story about a weird college professor who loves a burlap doll and gets fascinated with his housekeeper who is aware of his relationship with his doll.



I could go through the remaining short stories, but I am going to leave that for you to do. The remaining short stories are as amazing and amazingly bizarre as the ones that I have related to you. Heather Fowler is an amazing talent. She is the best short story writer who I have come across since Thom Jones. Pick up a copy of this book for your own self. You won’t be disappointed I assure you.

Buy the book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Elegantly-Naked...

Heather Fowler's website:

http://www.heatherfowlerwrites.com

[Melanie Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

Check out the top-ten interesting things characters do! (One includes pooping in the front yard).

Listen to Heather give context to and then read a historical piece (beware: a baby gets eaten) here.

There are so many kick-ass girls in YA. Are authors of literature keeping up? Find out here!

Why would someone write a collection full of characters with mental illnesses? It's not as simple as you might think! See why at HTMLGIANT.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I've read all of Fowler's books, with the exception of one (and it's because I'm busy, dammit). Suspended Heart, if I remember correctly, consists mostly of ghostly or fairy tales--nice, sweet stories that I enjoyed and reviewed for American Book Review. People with Holes was a bit more of a sexy romp, a place where a tiny penis might actually be a great prize (it's like a vibrator, you see). There were also stories of being wounded, and the process of healing.

I have This Time, While We're Awake, but that is the one I haven't had a chance to read yet. A review is forthcoming at Grab the Lapels soon, but it's being read by a guest reviewer (whom I am not sure knows Heather's tiny-penis-vibrator history...hmmm (and also, hehe!)).

Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness reads more like a serious "grown-up" book. There are some serious pieces that are really sad. I found these to be the historical stories, typically set during world turmoil (revolutions, holocaust, plague). Mental illness, as noted in the title, is another theme. Some of these characters aren't diagnosed as mentally ill, but we sure hear about them in society: the stalker, the paranoid person who cycles around in her own brain, the man who doesn't want to be "owned" by a woman.

My absolute favorite story is of Treble Ann; I want her to be the stuff of novel-length. She would then go on my "girls gone wild" bookshelf (no connection to stupid video of college boobs).

[Matt Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing collection of powerhouse stories. Usually short story collections are hit or miss, with a few good examples are left to hold up weaker filler ones. Not here. Every one of the stories is an emotional gut punch, full of ugly, disasterous beauty. Fowler captures the frustrating and fluid nature of mental illness that can drive our lives to the highest peaks or the lowest valleys. Strong, vulnerable, and a lot of fun to read.

[Kelly Waydick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wasn't what I thought it would be, it was ok but I don't think the title acurately protrays the book. I don't think it's something I would have picked to read either, glad I won it as I would have been disappointed if I bought it.

[Zack · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.examiner.com/review/elegan...