Airless Spaces

by Shulamith Firestone

In 1970, at the age of twenty-five, Shulamith Firestone wrote and published The Dialectic of Sex , immediately becoming a classic of second wave feminism across the world to this very day. It was one of the few books that dared to look at how radical feminism could and should shape the future; and one whose predictions (the cybernetic revolution, for example) proved startlingly prescient of issues today.Published by Semiotext(e) in 1998, Airless Spaces , Firestone's first work of fiction, is a collection of short stories written by Firestone as she found herself drifting from the professional career path she'd been on and into what she describes as a new "airless space." These deadpan stories, set among the disappeared and darkened sectors of New York City, are about losers who fall prey to an increasingly bureaucratized poverty and find themselves in an out of (mental) hospitals. But what gives characters such as SCUM-Manifesto author Valerie Solanas their depth and charge, is their the small crises that trigger an awareness that they're in trouble.Some time later, after I had moved to St. Mark's Place, I saw Valerie in the street. She asked me for a quarter, and I saw that she was begging. She had lost her apartment, and presumably her welfare. Later, a friend of mine who ran a store on St. Mark's Place said that Valerie had approached him for shelter. She was covered with sores, and wearing only a blanket to beg in. She had been out on the street approximately three months without shelter. Not long after that, she disappeared from the street entirely.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Feminism, Mental Illness, Psychology, Literature, Queer

Paperback

First published March 1, 1998

About the author

Shulamith Firestone (also called Shulie) was a Jewish, Canadian-born feminist. She was a central figure in the early development of radical feminism, having been a founding member of the New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists. In 1970, she authored The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, an important and widely influential feminist text.

Reviews

[jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is technically a collection of short stories but if we're being perfectly honest, it reads like a memoir told in quick vignettes. Reading this book is emotionally wearing. There are a lot of intense, sad stories and people. It peels the muscles of your heart apart. Debilitating mental illness is pretty much the major and only theme through this book. The stories are organized into bits about being in the hospital, stories about life after the hospital, losers (who are mostly people who have been in and out of the hospital), obituaries of people who have died, and suicides of people the author has known. And when we say hospital, we mean the mental hospital.

I was fascinated because I have an interest in what happens to radical feminists as they age, when they don't write a blog series for Bitch magazine and they disappear. Shulie refers to her successful previous work, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, almost like it happened to someone else. It's a lot. my feelings are kind of like this.

My favorite story was Firestone's obituary for Valerie Solanas:

She grabbed my book from a narrow shelf above her bed and showed me where she had scored it all over. “I didn’t like your book,” she said, and began to quarrel with my theories. I defended myself as well as I could, and tried to change the subject. I did not see this as a meeting with a fellow theorist.

and also

Some time later, after I had moved to St. Mark's Place, I saw Valerie in the street. She asked me for a quarter, and I saw that she was begging. She had lost her apartment, and presumably her welfare. Later, a friend of mine who ran a store on St. Mark's Place said that Valerie had approached him for shelter. She was covered with sores, and wearing only a blanket to beg in. She had been out on the street approximately three months without shelter. Not long after that, she disappeared from the street entirely.

[Abbyg. · Rating 5 out of 5]

How a book this short can both feel so long and cause a reader so much damage is pretty amazing. Ends like a piano falling on you.

[J.S.A. Lowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy fuck. (More here.)

[Luke McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don’t think I’ve read anything quite like this. A collection of autobiographical ‘short fictions’ that at times, given their obliqueness and brevity, read like fable. Taken together, the stories create a kind of fine-grained portraiture of mental illness and disability, written in a cutting, conversational tone almost entirely bereft of sentiment or melodrama. A dull nightmare of mind-numbing routine and institutionalised bureaucracy. Astoundingly direct.

[Femke Zwiep]

girl interrupted for grown ups (non derogatory)

[Vanessa Moll · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I thought I could just sign myself out if it didn't work out. Why can't I?"

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm still trying to figure out the right way to praise this book...more people should read it. The vignettes remind me of Toomer's Cane, but set in urban spaces and peopled with psychiatric patients. A beautiful work of keen observation and subtle empathy.

[Richard Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everybody buy this -- she should not be forgotten!

[Nina V · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75 :)

last story hit like a truck. i understood the why of the haphazard nature of the different essays/vignettes, however, at some parts, some little crevices, it felt too… appearing out of thin air? but that goes for mental illness anyway, i guess.

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chris kraus dice que este libro es un MILAGRO. Tiene razón.

[Keight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories (often as brief as one or two paragraphs) about people who find themselves in and out of mental hospitals. Though theoretically fiction, they are clearly written directly from Shulamith Firestone's own experiences, and Susan Faludi referred to them as "autobiographical vignettes" in her posthumous profile of Firestone, “Death of a Revolutionary.” Read more on my booklog

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

extremely personal. one of the only books i've ever read that used only the voices and stories of poor, disabled, and mentally ill people. shulamith firestone was a special person and thinker, and i wish we had so much more writing from her.

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow. more here: http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/tn...

[Ben Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A set of vignettes profiling the lost souls of various NYC institutions. Be aware though, that final chapter is absolutely devastating.

[Georgia Perlah · Rating 5 out of 5]

To preface, I was assigned this book to a history/gender studies class about the history of psychiatry through a gendered lens. This was the first fictional text we have worked with in class as well so I was excited to explore the topic using a different medium: short stories. And let’s be clear, these are SHORT stories, more like one-page vignettes of a fictionalized version Firestone’s own experience with institutionalization and mental hospitals.

Airless Spaces is broken into 5 little sections telling the stories of people in the hospital, out of the hospital, in between, and deaths and suicides the writer has known. Every single story in this (and there are a lot because most of them are just a page or 2 long) was an absolute gut-punch. I found Firestone’s writing beautiful. She writes in short, punchy sentences that convey emotion powerfully. It’s almost surprising how much this book accomplishes in such a small amount of pages as well as short choppy sentences. I also found that each character (and again, there are so many) was developed beautifully which showed attention to who these people were in reality as well as demonstrated Firestone’s ability to communicate. The last story is a bit longer, at around 10 pages and is about Firestone’s brother Danny who committed suicide as a young adult which led to Firestone’s own mental health crisis. This section was such an abrupt switch to the most beautifully intimate eulogy and it hit so hard.

"Did I say that my brother's favorite colors were bright blue and orange? Or that he had a concentration of plantets in the ninth house of higher education? Did I say that my brother was becoming increasingly anti-social? He swore he would never marry (so did I)."

I don’t have enough good things to say about this book, I’m so glad it was assigned to me and don’t know how I’m going to talk about it in class without breaking down. Everyone should read this, and it is short!

[Rüdiger]

:(

What strikes me in all these stories is the way that the characters suffer from bureaucracy, and the way social isolation leads them into loops of suffering, transforming them into "losers" who aren't really able to function anymore. And also the way the psych ward and these programs manage to "disappear" people.

I haven't read the Dialect of Sex. For me this was a collection of stories from inside and after the mental hospital and an exercise in empathy, as i myself have seen someone end up in an airless space. But: I did read a biography-obituary of Firestone before i read this, for which i am glad, because some of the stories clearly originate from her experiences as a radical feminist organizer and getting run out ("trashed") by her allies. And i think it doesn't match up with the timeline (it happened during or post-publishing maybe?), but Firestone had to survive on the support of friends in the later years of her life. That support eventually disintegrated as well, which led to her death. With that autobiographical knowledge i think a lot of the writing became much more meaningful to me.

“She read of a Reichian treatment once which was deemed successful: a seventy-nine year old widow began to recover “streaming” sensations in her body and limbs. Her cancer went into recession. But what should she do then? There was no one, nothing in her life for her to reach out towards. (Maybe this is why she had gotten sick in the first place—a cry for attention.)”

[Neïla]

J’ai finis ce livre la gorge serrée et les larmes aux yeux. C’est même difficile de lui donner une note. Je suis reconnaissante de l’avoir lu en tous cas
[Et d’avoir accès à la trace/d’avoir la preuve d’une personne qui avant nous, a réussi à créer, écrire, malgré les médicaments, la maladie, avec la maladie]

[Jamie Bronstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who is perennially interested in the topic of mental illness, I really enjoyed this book, which skates a fine line between truth and fiction. Radical feminist icon Firestone struggled with reality and was repeatedly a psychiatric inpatient before her rather gruesome death. This little book, her last, is a series of slices of life of women both in and outside of institutional settings. If flat affect had a writing voice, this would be it; she is terse and mostly unemotional but some of the stories or chapters have a complete narrative arc. The book ends with a compilation of suicides she had known, including her brother Danny.

The whole book reminded me of the song 88 lines about 44 women, in that a skilled lyricist can capture the gist of a character in less than a page.

[Alena Kharchanka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es un libro interesante, sin más.

[Abby Sandler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I should go back on my meds

[Amálie Mrázová · Rating 5 out of 5]

What seems at first like a book you can read with one breath, turns out to be not as easy to swallow. Each part of this book evoked different emotions in me, however the intersection would be “pain”. Shulamith shows us realness of lives that have been haunted with mental disease and where you can end up, even when you never expected it, in this world where each of us stands alone. I would recommend reading slower than I did, especially if you are diagnosed/struggle with any mental disorder/issues and let those scraps of stories sink.

[Sarah Fonseca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most unfathomable and incredible inventories of mental healthcare's failures, as told through short, stoic vignettes of each individual's plight. The work is thinly veiled and it does not take the armchair feminist or historian long to identify some of the parties, including lesbian radicals, gay poets, and stunted revolutionaries.

Of greatest profundity is a final piece on the narrator's brother's death that brings the work home, with abrupt intimacy.

[Lars Meijer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Een serie (auto-)biografische verhalen over mentale ziektes, lichamelijke teleurstelling en stukgelopen levens. Dit was geen aangename leeservaring.

Edit (9/4/23): Bij herlezing nog beter dan eerst. Dit is een (deprimerend) meesterwerk.

[Catherine]

lesbian feminism

[Liza]

ooof!

[Jennifer]

"She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan" (59).

Incredibly depressing, especially when read in conjunction with "The Dialectic of Sex." Presumably everyone how ends up reading "Airless Spaces" has read TDOS first, and the contrast between the breathless thinking and possibilities of The Dialectic and the muted depression of "Airless Spaces" is devastating. Only a few of the short vignettes here are directly autobiographical, but many of them are probably loosely autobiographical, with Firestone seemingly referring to herself via different names. This only heightens the sense of dissociation and fractured identity conveyed by the book, as Firestone - or the various characters of the book - has lost her sense of self, her identity.

It's tempting to read a certain political loss into the book - Firestone's decline representing the decline of the feminist movement, and the general decline of radicalism since the 60s-70s. But ultimately this might politicize her life too much - because after all she was just one woman who, as elusively stated on the back cover "refused a career as a professional feminist," and apparently didn't even want to talk about feminism later in her life. Her personal story certainly exhibits the personal difficulties that can come from taking such radical stances in a hostile society, but its reductive to boil her personal struggles down to that alone. Though it is interesting how her story loosely parallels her brothers, whose death was a major catalyst for her own troubles, and to think of that in light of her own theoretical renunciation of the family.

As somebody deeply inspired by Firestone, I've always found her life story heartbreaking, which is maybe why it took me so long to get around to reading this. But it is certainly a necessary, shattering read documenting the lives of those on the outskirts of - and burdened by - society. In a way then, I guess there is a bit about it that's similar to "The Dialectic."

[Virginia · Rating 4 out of 5]

No hay nada más difícil que enfrentarte a la crueldad y el rechazo de tu familia y entorno desde que eres una niña. Sentirte un bicho raro, una inadaptada y una infeliz que cree merecerlo por el trato recibido.

Así es como es presentada Circe en este relato que reinventa algunos grandes mitos griegos. Una novela de crecimiento que nos muestra a una niña miedosa e insegura que se convierte en una adulta madura que, aunque carga con mucho dolor y sufrimiento, es fuerte, valiente, segura de sí misma y capaz de luchar por quienes ama contra viento y marea.

Pero, para mí, también es una historia sobre cómo nos marca y transforma la soledad. El exilio de Circe la obliga a luchar contra ella misma y busca desesperadamente el cariño y el acompañamiento de muchos de los personajes que la visitan, especialmente los que la escuchan y se quedan a su lado, aunque sea solo por interés. Esto me ha parecido muy triste, y es que todas las historias de mujeres representadas en la mitología lo son. Y no sirve de nada mirar para otro lado, ya que incluso en este libro (en teoría, feminista para lo que se supone que fueron las historias originales) se observa una profunda misoginia y rechazo hacia lo femenino.

Aparte de esto (que podría extender el debate hasta el infinito), creo que la forma de escribir de Miller hace que las distintas partes de Circe funcionen a la perfección, a medida que la protagonista va evolucionando y se enfrenta cada vez más ante más problemas, incluida su enorme soledad. Está muy bien trabajada, especialmente, su maternidad por cómo muestra lo que esta supone en la vida real: una situación que te lleva al límite, te pone a prueba y te cambia la vida. Y se demuestra en su afán por cuidar a su hijo sobre todas las cosas, incluso llegando a sobreprotegerlo.

En resumen, una historia de una mujer empoderada porque no le queda otro remedio, como a muchas otras en la Historia, que, a pesar de sus errores, aprende a leerse a sí misma y a las personas, comprenderlas y aceptarlas pese a todo.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I dreamed I was on a sinking ship. It was a luxury liner like the Titanic. The water was slowly seeping up from below, and the people aboard the ship knew that they were doomed. On the two top decks it was gaiety and mirth, with people dressed to the nines, eat drink and be merry for soon we shall all die. But a note of hysteria hovered in the merrymaking and here and there I saw strange goings on, like in a Grosz cartoon.” Shulamith Firestone, as famous for her influential feminist writings as for her struggle with schizophrenia, captured the dangerous and dark worlds of in and out of the hospital in her beautifully bizarre collection of short pieces, Airless Spaces; the title is fitting, given its sense of claustrophobia and strife, the mental image it conjures of a person thrashing and clutching for air. Each piece is a character-driven snapshot of a person in trouble, whether they know it or not, from the hospital to release, losers, obits, all culminating in a staggering final part, ‘Suicides I Have Known’, which ends with ‘Danny’, on her brother’s mysterious death: “I spent some years trying to find Danny in the spiritual realm, but I was told by more than one medium that his violent death had shattered his ethereal body so he couldn't be reached […] theories about his death, whether murder or suicide, afterlife or no, contributed to my own growing madness — which led to my hospitalization, medication, and a shattering nervous breakdown.” Elsewhere, from the New York nobodies to Valerie Solanas, Firestone conjures a symphony of despair both endlessly haunting and impressively crafted.

[PaperDreams55 · Rating 3 out of 5]

He conocido a Shulamit Firestone a través de este libro de memorias. Me da rabia no haberla conocido antes y que su nombre haya estado silenciado durante tanto tiempo.
Ella cuenta su vida en forma de relatos, tanto su paso por varios centros de salud mental, como el de algunas de sus amigas o compañeras. Es muy duro ver cómo se ha tratado a las mujeres en este contexto. Cómo la sociedad las olvida y las deja incapacitadas, con dificultad para valerse por sí mismas y atiborrándolas a medicamentos.
Es muy complicado ver cómo van cambiando sus pensamientos, llegando a un punto de sentirse sin valor y sin ganas de vivir.
Cada vez que leo un libro de memorias de este tipo lo paso mal, me da rabia, pena e impotencia. Eso es lo que me ha generado esta lectura.
Queda el consuelo de poder conocer ahora quién ha sido y cómo vivió Shulamit Firestone su vida y sus últimos años a través de sus propias palabras.
Estos libros son necesarios, para no olvidar, para dar voz y para traerlas al presente.

[Misty · Rating 5 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I found this book through another book about women with mental illness, and then had to scour the internet to find it at a used bookstore.

Firstly, I know nothing of the author, Shulamith Firestone, specifically her other works and work in the feminist movement. Secondly, I read this book as it was mentioned in passing and the topic is of interest to me, I really went into it not knowing too much of anything. This book is a quick read that reads much like a memoir although is considered a collection of short stories and vignettes. The topic is mental illness and the candour is welcome. There is no fluff and platitudes, she talks of illness and death simply, matter of factly. She shares stories of not only her own struggles but those of people in her life, both close and distant.

This book was a lovely reminder that sometimes mental illness is ugly and takes its toll and yet also, that for some with mental illness, life just carries on.