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Places That Make You Shake
Michele Matheson's novel of addiction, Saving Angelfish
By TOM CHRISTIE
Wednesday, February 7, 2007 - 3:00 pm

"I love your book. Call me."

That message, delivered in an e-mail from Tin House editorial director Lee Montgomery, was classic, but for the first-time author who received it, Michele Matheson, the journey to get there was something else — unless you consider descent into the junkie nightmare classic as well.

Matheson, 35, is the daughter of two actors, Deanna Lund and Don Matheson, and is an actress herself, having played, among other roles, Randy Quaid's Amish girlfriend in Kingpin, the "dimwitted but beautiful" Angela Chatstikovich in TV's Mr. Belvedere and a lead in the Academy Award–nominated short Johnny Flynton.

When she was a teenager and hanging out with rock bands on tour, Matheson says, she was always the one who kept it clean, drugwise, but in the early '90s, that all changed. She began using heroin, and the next seven or eight years passed the way they do for addicts — badly, for the most part. Although there is not necessarily a direct line from Matheson's life to that of her protagonist in Saving Angelfish — a young female actress called Maxella Gordon — Matheson says that she has "experienced some of these things." (Maxella's parents play a significant role in the book, which Matheson dedicates to her mother and father "for their enduring patience and will to love.") Matheson herself didn't manage to get clean — and stay there — until the summer of 2001, at 29. A few months later, she walked into Jim Krusoe's beginning writing class at Santa Monica College.

"She looked a little disheveled, like she just fell off a bandstand," says Krusoe. He gave the class an exercise for the following week, and when he read Matheson's take, he said to himself, "Oh, that's really interesting." On the basis of Matheson's response to a second writing exercise, Krusoe asked her to move into his advanced class. "Her work was original and curious. I just wanted to see where she would go with it."

So too did her new classmates, most of whom were what Krusoe calls "ladies from a different era. She was writing about shooting up, and they said, 'We didn't know this could be so interesting!' And they were with her all the way."

Matheson also credits the "older ladies" in her class, one of whom told her to "write from places that make you shake." Well, if Matheson had anything, it was places that made her shake. So she kept writing. "I borrowed their faith in the project," she says. And the results kept impressing classmates and teacher alike.

"Michele is a natural writer with a rare ability to sound like herself," says Krusoe. "She's smart as hell, and when she was revising, she would do it five times better than I imagined. My socks would fall off at what she would do with my little suggestions." At a certain point, Krusoe realized that what Matheson was working on was a book. "I said to myself, 'Holy shit, I'm dealing with more than I thought here.' "

Saving Angelfish is a relentlessly dark tale — no non-junkie reading it is going to run out to buy heroin — suffused with, and buoyed by, light. Maxella, or Max, is strung out every which way — too far from her parents (who won't let her back into their lives until she's clean), too close to junkie friends like Wolf or dealers like the rapacious Grandpops or the legless Carlotta. If she isn't exactly doing her best to get clean, moving from one to the other in the days leading up to Christmas, she is simply doing her best, with help from Frances, a talking porcelain angel Max meets at Rite Aid. The book begins:


Max lies on the beach with one night clean. The sickness is beginning, and still, she has an odd, vaguely familiar feeling of being alive. Considering it's a typical Los Angeles winter morning, about fifty degrees, and she's down to a hundred pounds, not a lot of hair on her head, and coming off heroin, she's surprised she hasn't frozen to death. She can thank a Canadian postwoman's jacket for that. The ocean's rushing and waiting sounds put everything into perspective. It rumbles and sighs like it's lonely. She listens.

The surf is a force to be reckoned with. Sometimes it's calm. It sleeps and dreams. And underneath, the fish, the plants, they move like eyes rolling back and forth under the surface of an eyelid. Other times the sea swells like a heart.


Right away, you get Matheson's yin and yang: the dark and the light, near-death and life, bleak realities and sweet imaginings. She packs a punch from the depths, a place you're not sure you want to know about, yet at the same time possesses a delicate nature. And she has the ability to make you see things in a simple and yet memorable way. In the middle of a harrowing, deeply drawn scene, one that opens, "Max's apartment is dry and stuffy and smells like vinegar," Matheson writes:


When she gets used to it, she withstands looking down at her body, at her infection. The gauze still covers it but is soaked with blood and now water. She tears the gauze off and drops it. It spreads into pink elephant ears and floats to the drain.


The power of Saving Angelfish comes from these images and the place in Matheson from which they emerge; it seems that this is the place that helped her escape her own personal hell, and to write this book. It's the same essential lightness that gets Max through it, and compels the reader to follow her.

This is not to say that Saving Angelfish is flawless — the book could have been even leaner, the editing more rigorous; characters' names could have been more organic; and the use of Frances, who comes and goes, could have been more consistent. But you also get something special from new writers when you give them enough rope. If some hang themselves, others give you something to be grateful for:


A long time ago, she taped brown grocery-bag paper over the mirror above the sink. It was after a night of bingeing on cocaine. First she cropped her hair and shaved her head. Then she shaved off her eyebrows. She felt like how a dog must feel after getting sheared; all that work building a scent, defining oneself, only to be clipped off. Shaving off her eyebrows was like erasing anger from her face. And the darkness was left just under her eyes in half-moons.


It was Krusoe, of course, who told Matheson to send her manuscript to Tin House. "He saved my life," she says. "Totally."

You might assume that that "Totally" is said with a great heaviness, but you'd be wrong. If you can't hear her read, you'll have to trust me on this: While the gravity of her personal story is clear, Matheson's delivery will nonetheless make you smile.



SAVING ANGELFISH | By MICHELE MATHESON | Tin House Books | 250 pages | $14 softcover

Matheson will read at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Feliz, on Saturday, Feb. 10, 5 p.m.



Also by TOM CHRISTIE

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Wednesday, December 6, 2006 - 12:00 pm
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Copyright 2007 LA Weekly, LP
LA Weekly • 6715 Sunset Blvd • Los Angeles CA 90028

Arts: Book: Saving Angelfish by Michele Matheson
INPRINT
Eugene Lang College Newspaper
By Estelle Hallick

In Matheson's premier novel, she reveals the life of Max, a heroin-addicted aspiring actress, with an intensity that is almost too real to bear. Cut off from her parents until she is clean, Max confides in a cheap wind-up angel and getsdragged deeper into a world she's never fully ready to depart. Will she ever be ready? Distributed by TinHouseBooks, a new publisher dedicated to the pursuit of fresh and often overlooked work, Matheson delivers a story of struggle and aching reality in terse, haunting prose.
Posted by Inprint at 12:10 AM

"Matheson's promising debut, a gritty novel from Tin House Books' New Voice Series, tells the bleak story of a wayward L.A. junkie named Max. Virtually disowned by her dysfunctional parents, out of a job, sickeningly underweight, months behind on rent and unable to kick her debilitating heroin habit, Max flits from day to depressing day in a constant state of decrepitude. When she's not shooting up, she's snorting coke, and when she's not doing that she's thinking about her next fix. Despite her spiraling decline and a number of near-death experiences, nothing really changes for Max throughout her story. Her dealers (Grandpops, her crusty, repulsive landlord; and Carlotta, a beastly legless woman) and fellow junkies (Wolf and a roller-skating waif named Tutu) share Max's single-minded pursuit of getting high. Though initially mesmerizing, the drug-centric plot begins to ware a little thin; the crux of the book can be found in Max's unchanging attitude toward her life: 'The goal is not to think-about anything. She winds up places, and that's fine.' Nonetheless, Matheson's sharp, highly detailed prose thrusts readers in the driver's seat of an out-of-control life." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Jan 09, 2007
Book Review : Saving Angelfish

More than enough has been said in the very recent past about the veracity of truthfulness in the literary memoir. I believe in the genre, I believe that the stories we tell about ourselves are always going to be colored by experience and may not stand up to the same scrutiny as a true autobiography would. I find the line between an "autobiographical novel" and a "literary memoir" to be fine and permeable and not necessarily relevant to the transmission of experience. I wish someone had bought James Frey's work as the novel he originally shopped around; it would have saved everyone a lot of time and trouble. The controversy didn't take away from the experience I watched customers have reading and talking about the book.
I approached Saving Angelfish, a new first novel from Los Angeles writer Michele Matheson, the same way I approach anything billed as closely based on the author's life; my only question was, "Do I get any real sense of experience out of the story?" In the case of Matheson's achingly true descent, I more than do. Her novel of addiction, of coming close to bottoming out in the strangely surreal sunny city of angels, rings as true as any memoir I've read. This is a story told by a person that could only have lived it, not in a page-by-verifiable-page kind of living, but in a "my life, my memories, my story" way.
Maxella Gordon is a product of a Hollywood family, not a big-star kind of family with photographers documenting every step down a celebrity's child staircase, but the child of working class Hollywood, people in the industry who work almost anonymously for years acquiring stories and scars along the way. Her mother and father are divorced yet inseparable, united mostly in pain about their daughter's struggle with every kind of drug she can find. Maxilla's mother breakfasts on gin-soaked dried fruit. Maxilla's drug of choice, if choice is the right word, is heroin.
The drug world is a funny place; you find yourself calling people "friend" who's only connection to you is your connection. Maxilla is close to a variety of strange, colorful and ultimately selfish people who are there for her when times are good, but will steal her stash and leave her stranded when times are tight or their own demons rise up. Maxella herself lives in a world stopped mid-plot, always looking for the next route from low to very high. She's guided through this world by a stolen talking Christmas angel, a voice of reason and hope from the glove box, under the seat or in her pocket. Her angel is a perfect narrator for her voyage, tattered yet hopeful, bright yet cheap.
There is no happy ending in Saving Angelfish; there is a hopeful ending, a point at which I could see a change in the path Maxella is heading down. Like Alice, trying every "eat me" and "drink me" she can, looking for her way out of the hole she's in, Maxella has reached a door she has the wherewithal to step through. We hope the character has the power. I'm sure Matheson has found the way

Wednesday, December 27, 2006


LA Times Review

BOOK REVIEW
By Lucinda Michele Knapp
Sister Morphine
SAVING ANGELFISH: A Novel Michele Matheson (Tin House Books: 250 pp., $14 paper)

Addiction is one hell of a trip. Writers have tackled this topic in works wrung through with both redemptive strength ("The Basketball Diaries") and visions that spiral downward, becoming too dark to transcend ("Requiem for a Dream"). Los Angeles writer Michele Matheson's debut novel, "Saving Angelfish," seems to hover, for its first half, in the former category; soon, however, it seems there will be no hope for Matheson's desperate protagonist.

In writing that's disturbingly lucid, Matheson outlines the haphazard and blurry timeline that Maxella Gordon .. Max for short .. follows in the days leading up to Christmas. The struggling actress journeys through Los Angeles, from a flophouse to her trashed apartment, through an aborted commercial audition, to her mother's home and then to a gangland crack house.

Her mother, Phyllis, frets silently over Max, eats gin-soaked prunes for breakfast and begins popping one too many Vicodin. Ernie, Max's father, moved out years ago, but over time he and Phyllis have grown together again, so that now Phyllis is the only witness to his daily regimen of pills .. for high blood pressure, heart disease and acid reflux .. as well as nitroglycerin patches for chest pain. While her dealers and junkie friends add to her muddled existence, Max gains confidence from her mother's love, and she knows with implacable certainty that her father needs his daughter's help to get healthy.

Max's sanity has been submerged in drugs for so long that it's begun to slip from her grasp. Hallucinations of "sky dogs" haunt her significantly less-than-sober drives to and from various parts of town. Perhaps most significantly, there's the talking angel. As Max is shoplifting in a drugstore, she encounters an angel .. a small ornament with soft wings and braids set high upon her head. "I'm God's daughter," chirps the little character with saccharine sincerity. "You're God's daughter too." Max steals the angel, which continues, throughout the unraveling of the story, to supply a steady stream of advice that Max never seems to take.

The novel is shot through with the numbed horror of one who has confronted a terrible reality. Life becomes static when all hope has been extracted, rendering it a still-life painted with disturbing realism: The self-destructive patterns become hypnotic, dulling the senses. Matheson's lengthy accounts of drug paraphernalia and preparation, and the subsequent dangerously submersing high, leave the reader with a sense that time is passing while Max remains trapped.

This is a flawlessly executed study of a life that's fully dissolved. But Max's rhythm of scoring drugs, getting high, coming down, getting sick and hunting for more melts into an inescapable haze, and after a while, the descriptions begin to wear on the reader.

Matheson illuminates the rigid, frozen lives of Max's parents with dark clarity. As a gear turning the wrong way in a machine can cause the others to foul, one addict can spill unhealthful patterns and nervous silences into the most well-adjusted of families, until the entire familial machine is operating incorrectly. When Phyllis immerses herself in her gardening, her decorating or her prunes, she's medicating her own heartbreak.

There are brief glimpses of hope. Max gets off heroin for a few short days when she's kidnapped by a disabled Latina gangster turned dealer and the woman's soul-sick son. She manages somehow to arrive at Christmas dinner with her family. Right before, when a fellow junkie steals her drugs, Max achieves a few moments of clarity. But just as quickly, any barely normal scenarios shatter, leaving Max desperate for some sort of quick fix to numb the pain. The addiction seeps into Max's thinking like fog, leaving her incapacitated, socially unacceptable, even borderline psychotic.

The reader's own frustration with Max, and the situations in which she's trapped herself, mirrors the frustration of her parents. Despite her assertions that she wants "to be useful," Max remains utterly purposeless, even to herself. Wanting something doesn't instantly deliver it to our sides; recovery from chemical dependency often takes extraordinary measures, superhuman support and great courage. The problems we strive to escape through our own private addictions and unhealthful behaviors are not easy to face. For Max, they are impossible, too great to surmount, but Matheson herself has taken them head-on with this novel, which faces addiction with a courageous spirit Max herself cannot muster.

Lucinda Michele Knapp was managing editor of LA Alternative Press and has written for Variety.