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Falling Man
In the beginning there was despair, and nothing else. How terrible it is to know that you must hit the ground, that the fall is always short, and that time and air both have no substance and could never break your fall. Young people always feel this way, even if they have not recently leapt from the top floor of a skyscraper.
Falling Man is a collection of 34 pieces of short prose and poetry about mental illness, suicide, and the incoherent nightmare of early 21st Century life. The works included touch on moments of recent historical trauma ranging from the Charleston church massacre ("Storm Roof") to 9/11 ("Falling Man") to the Trump presidency ("The White House at Night") as well as the smaller pains and humiliations of daily life. A series of agnostic parables, morals not included.
Falling Man is a collection of 34 pieces of short prose and poetry about mental illness, suicide, and the incoherent nightmare of early 21st Century life. The works included touch on moments of recent historical trauma ranging from the Charleston church massacre ("Storm Roof") to 9/11 ("Falling Man") to the Trump presidency ("The White House at Night") as well as the smaller pains and humiliations of daily life. A series of agnostic parables, morals not included.
73 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 28, 2017
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16 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 23, 2017
Very bleak, very funny, and full of rope tricks
If I had to sum this book up with one image, I'd choose the hobbyist wizard who routinely enchants a piece of rope to strangle himself into unconsciousness. Unable to maintain the spell when he's out cold, the rope drops him, and he feels good for a few days. It's his therapy. This book is very bleak, very funny, and full of passages like this. Falling Man is a prize I found in the free pile, and a shining example of why I bother combing through freebies. I'd like to read a longer narrative from this guy.
If I had to sum this book up with one image, I'd choose the hobbyist wizard who routinely enchants a piece of rope to strangle himself into unconsciousness. Unable to maintain the spell when he's out cold, the rope drops him, and he feels good for a few days. It's his therapy. This book is very bleak, very funny, and full of passages like this. Falling Man is a prize I found in the free pile, and a shining example of why I bother combing through freebies. I'd like to read a longer narrative from this guy.
August 14, 2022
This is exactly the sort of thing I would expect from one of the creators of Misery Tourism, in that it is full of things I wasn't expecting. These short pieces are funny, insightful, and thoroughly original. Despite the subject matter often being so dark, I actually found this collection rather uplifting. Whether that's because the intellectual exploration of depression and suicide helped me with my own feelings on the topic, or because of the gallows humour with which it has been presented. Either way, it is clear that the author is a fine fine writer.
The collection as a whole is excellent, but the pieces that really stood out for me were the titular Falling Man, the story about ghosts, and the shame game. The latter of those being a perfect allegory for submitting any kind of artistic content or opinion into the grim void of social media.
Great stuff. I hope William Duryea writes more.
The collection as a whole is excellent, but the pieces that really stood out for me were the titular Falling Man, the story about ghosts, and the shame game. The latter of those being a perfect allegory for submitting any kind of artistic content or opinion into the grim void of social media.
Great stuff. I hope William Duryea writes more.
November 8, 2021
A WHITMAN’S SAMPLER OF WOE
In my days of going to AA/NA meetings, hanging out with the colorful supporting cast members populating Recoveryland, I spent a lot of time with a guy named Will, who was a coke addict and thief who must have mouthed off to the wrong drug dealer at one point because he had been ceremoniously curb-stomped: 75% of his teeth were broken out of his mouth. He was a wise guy. But full of uplifting simple advice about how to find meaning in life. He read Viktor Frankl and waxed philosophical and hopeful at times. One day I was telling him about my life.
“I suffer from depression, and I—“
“You don’t suffer from depression,” he cut me off, “you enjoy every minute of it. You’re loving it.”
It was harsh. I was pissed. How dare he. But later upon reflection, I wondered if he were somehow right. I saw it as a complex mental illness that is indeed a form of suffering but one that causes a fascination in the sufferer, something which threatens to become a fetish and a lens through which to see everything. Because depression is all-enveloping and all-encompassing. But in a way the mind can come to derive some sort of satisfaction or inverted, misunderstood pleasure from it.
I’m not saying that William Duryea in his book Falling Man is such a fascinated fetishizer of depression, but the subject of depression and depressing *things* is treated with so many penetrating cross-sectional views that as a reader one can only surrender to the flow of darkness and despair in hopes of finding insight. And insight is there, but it is bitter and frightening. Suicide, like the goblin always perched on the female sleeper’s chest in the nightmare painting, is looked at from many unbearable angles, mostly morbid but sometimes yielding dark humor. Duryea gives us many short fictional and poetic episodes with varying wit and varying shades of pitch-black thought. One of my favorites (although it was harrowing and unforgiving) was “Suicide of a Clinically Depressed Predictive Text Emulator” in which publicly available suicide notes were fed into the hopper of a computer program, which used the texts and grammar of these final words to construct a kind of surreal, poignant “mega-note,” a kind of hologram of an idealized suffering human:
If anyone reads this note and they didn’t know why I did this: it was because of how much happier life is all over the place (and everyone but you know what happened)…For years I wished that I’d feel like nothing they did made me sick, or that they might pass me any minute and live for people would give me liberty.
Another moment from the book which brought a welcome smile to my face was the set of rules for a fiendish parlor game called “Shame.” Still very dark but I could sense the flush of life and humor in that part. Duryea can be quite funny when he wants to be, even under the layers of dread.
The book is mainly composed of very brief fictional or poetic investigations into these dark matters, and if I were to criticize or perhaps more charitably try to suggest areas of growth or progression, it would be to say that I wish the pieces were more sustained, longer, and went further to dramatize the concepts using more characterization, dialogue, and plot. More variation of mood and potential flights from darkness, which I understand may be hard to come by, but I have to believe it is possible. I became claustrophobic (maybe that was intended) with these small gasps of finite oxygen trapped in the coffin of the buried alive. I haven’t read any other fiction from Duryea but I wonder what would happen with a little lengthening and broadening of the fictional pallet, an expansion if the conditions of sadness would allow it. But maybe I’m missing slightly the purpose of the book: to be a reflection of sorrow, a Whitman’s sampler of woe. I just wanted to taste more of life’s flavor, which I know must exist under all that dark, bitter chocolate.
In my days of going to AA/NA meetings, hanging out with the colorful supporting cast members populating Recoveryland, I spent a lot of time with a guy named Will, who was a coke addict and thief who must have mouthed off to the wrong drug dealer at one point because he had been ceremoniously curb-stomped: 75% of his teeth were broken out of his mouth. He was a wise guy. But full of uplifting simple advice about how to find meaning in life. He read Viktor Frankl and waxed philosophical and hopeful at times. One day I was telling him about my life.
“I suffer from depression, and I—“
“You don’t suffer from depression,” he cut me off, “you enjoy every minute of it. You’re loving it.”
It was harsh. I was pissed. How dare he. But later upon reflection, I wondered if he were somehow right. I saw it as a complex mental illness that is indeed a form of suffering but one that causes a fascination in the sufferer, something which threatens to become a fetish and a lens through which to see everything. Because depression is all-enveloping and all-encompassing. But in a way the mind can come to derive some sort of satisfaction or inverted, misunderstood pleasure from it.
I’m not saying that William Duryea in his book Falling Man is such a fascinated fetishizer of depression, but the subject of depression and depressing *things* is treated with so many penetrating cross-sectional views that as a reader one can only surrender to the flow of darkness and despair in hopes of finding insight. And insight is there, but it is bitter and frightening. Suicide, like the goblin always perched on the female sleeper’s chest in the nightmare painting, is looked at from many unbearable angles, mostly morbid but sometimes yielding dark humor. Duryea gives us many short fictional and poetic episodes with varying wit and varying shades of pitch-black thought. One of my favorites (although it was harrowing and unforgiving) was “Suicide of a Clinically Depressed Predictive Text Emulator” in which publicly available suicide notes were fed into the hopper of a computer program, which used the texts and grammar of these final words to construct a kind of surreal, poignant “mega-note,” a kind of hologram of an idealized suffering human:
If anyone reads this note and they didn’t know why I did this: it was because of how much happier life is all over the place (and everyone but you know what happened)…For years I wished that I’d feel like nothing they did made me sick, or that they might pass me any minute and live for people would give me liberty.
Another moment from the book which brought a welcome smile to my face was the set of rules for a fiendish parlor game called “Shame.” Still very dark but I could sense the flush of life and humor in that part. Duryea can be quite funny when he wants to be, even under the layers of dread.
The book is mainly composed of very brief fictional or poetic investigations into these dark matters, and if I were to criticize or perhaps more charitably try to suggest areas of growth or progression, it would be to say that I wish the pieces were more sustained, longer, and went further to dramatize the concepts using more characterization, dialogue, and plot. More variation of mood and potential flights from darkness, which I understand may be hard to come by, but I have to believe it is possible. I became claustrophobic (maybe that was intended) with these small gasps of finite oxygen trapped in the coffin of the buried alive. I haven’t read any other fiction from Duryea but I wonder what would happen with a little lengthening and broadening of the fictional pallet, an expansion if the conditions of sadness would allow it. But maybe I’m missing slightly the purpose of the book: to be a reflection of sorrow, a Whitman’s sampler of woe. I just wanted to taste more of life’s flavor, which I know must exist under all that dark, bitter chocolate.
April 6, 2019
Maybe the world is haunted, and God created it by unspooling a yarn ball of anxiety, and it sounds like this.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews