ally

This past weekend I read ally by Madison Scott-Clary¹, and I found it a deeply rewarding experience. ally is a fictionalized memoir in which Scott-Clary grapples with issues of mental health, sexual and asexual identity (there’s some excellent writing about aceness in here!), what it means to have a self, how abuse and trauma affect those things, and, excitingly for at least me, how being a hopelessly nerdy furry specifically inflects all of that in really interesting directions. It’s a typographical adventure (the whole thing is produced in LaTeX), with the inclusion of sheet music, threaded stories, interlocking footnotes, and subtle but crucial uses of color. (Think House of Leaves, although it’s less frenetic, or one of the really good Catgirl Goth Rave invites.) That alone is probably enough enticement for some of y’all, but I am really excited to recommend it for another specific reason: I think it’s my favorite plural memoir.

In order to explain why, I need to start with the premise of the work. Scott-Clary’s description is a good start:

This ally is summoned (Scott-Clary uses “invoked”) seemingly for the purposes of this project, although they also existed beforehand. The ally is insistent that they² are not a friend, and that certain things are “Not [their] department,” but while they are pushy about certain topics or events, they are ultimately, in my reading, pushing Scott-Clary to better understand and contextualize her experiences; the ally is a sort of supportive collaborator, but not quite an inner therapeutic voice? Therapists aren’t that snarky, and therapists aren’t low-key aware of their intended consumption by an external audience. (A dynamic that significantly complicates this kind of internality.³) The ally also plays the role of an informed reader, reacting to the things that Scott-Clary says, and by the end of the book we are following along with them, now also knowing many of the details of Scott-Clary’s life, able to anticipate and echo their interjections and suggestions to move from topic X to topic Y. It’s fun.

Classic plural memoir isn’t fun. Books like The Flock or When Rabbit Howls have moments of joy but at least to me as a reader have this almost prurient gaze into the suffering of people with MPD/DID and this expectation that over time, your awareness of the narrator’s trauma will build, producing sympathy and pity and revulsion, and then offering you a journey with them to share in their therapeutically-approved catharsis so that you now are more accepting of folks with this disorder and also in awe of the brave, rule-breaking psychologists who often coauthor and always leave a significant stamp on these works, and how wonderful they are. I think usually they’re not wonderful; I wasn’t in those therapeutic sessions so I don’t know, but I think that often the folks with the bad boundaries in those stories are more the therapists than the patients. The ally, in contrast, is Scott-Clary, and the book is a continuous negotiation between them about what their boundaries are, what they’re ready to talk about, how much they will share. And I do mean both of them; what is “That’s not my department” but a statement of boundaries?⁴

Contemporary plural memoir, creative non-fiction, &c. tries to work around this, and there are a bunch of other things I think are great, even though they might borrow more heavily from that lurid psychologist-approved tradition then they might like.⁵ But when you’re writing from inside the plural community and for the plural community, you have to engage in all of these heavyweight conversations about endogenic versus traumagenic, diagnostic categories, turf wars, and just… it’s exhausting, and presupposes a bunch of things about the field of discourse, and makes it really hard to step outside all of that entirely. Scott-Clary, as far as I can tell, accidentally solved this problem by never stepping into it, a line of play admittedly no longer available to some of us but brilliant in its simplicity. She and her ally surely given their social group are aware of the existence of plural systems, but to them, at least in the world of the text, it is not a question worth considering. We must take her and her ally at face value; we must accept the panoply of her experience as they present it together; it’s hard enough to label the experiences described: are they ace? was that trauma? is this grief? Fuck trying to label the secondary effects. Who has time for that?

But reading it as a plural person or people or whatever, the language for this will suck forever, it’s fresh air after months stuck indoors. One needn’t classify the experience of multiple selves in order to express it, inhabit it, even build on it in order to examine it. Scott-Clary, even inside the narrative, exists in a nebulous space I wouldn’t call explicitly plural but wouldn’t call explicitly singlet either. Like many folks, she talks about some portion of her history as a mythical Before Times⁶ that can at best be partially understood, and uses her deadname as a sort-of-but-not-entirely separate person who is dead now. Ish. The work of writing ally — the work of being an ally — can also be understood as an attempt to produce a new Scott-Clary, plurality in serial instead of in parallel, collaboratively producing from oneselves a one self. (Me holding this up like a butterfly: Is this integration?) There’s also just a hint, from time to time, that Scott-Clary and her ally might not be alone. I don’t think that’s the most important part of the work, but for me, reading from my standpoint, it’s something I’m naturally attuned to:

This excerpt is from a section of ally written on June 10, 2020, about unemployment, and you might be thinking “how would any of this have been written a week ago and be in print,” and spoilers, it’s a hypertext! I personally really recommend the book form, I think the physical artifactiness of it does a lot of work, but you can read all of ally at ally.id, too, and have a different experience exploring the text than I did, and it’s still going. I’ve poked at it online a bit, and it can do things that the print copy can’t do, like this awesome map of the whole work thus far, but it also doesn’t feel as approachable or as permanent, for me at least, as the book does. There’s something about reading a MUCK log that’s been printed into a book that’s just very different from reading a MUCK log on a comupter screen. I read chat logs all the time. I don’t hold a book and read them and think of them as history ever. And I don’t hardly ever read them, occasionally notice names I know, and realize it’s a history that I’m in some way connected to, that many of you reading this right now are in some way connected to, because furry history is queer history, furry history is increasingly trans history, and so much of it is stored in logfiles of ephemeral online interactions that are bitrotting away as we speak. This one — a particular tragic moment in a particular small community — is now archived forever, or at least as long as books last, in print. That matters to me more than I expected.

“That matters to me more than I expected,” said about someone else’s life, is my summary of this whole book.

If you like the way I ramble in pieces like this or in the ridiculously long emails I send out once a year, and you find it matters to you more than you expected, my point to all of this is: Scott-Clary can do that, too, and she’s done a whole book of it, and it has cool typography to boot. You should read it. It’s even a great time to buy it if that’s a line of flight available to you. In addition, if you’re interested in plural memoir, or experiences tangential to plural experiences, or just ways to write about multiplicity without centering multiplicity: seriously, check this shit out. It’s great. I’m not sure if this is plural history — an idea I think is still trying to define itself — but I think it’s very likely to say something interesting to you about our possible plural futures.