Chapter 1
When Eve is a teenager, she falls ill with a collection of symptoms doctors can’t diagnose.
Before the sickness, she thinks she’ll study math. That is her best subject, and she’s drawn to sprawling questions with tidy answers. Some part of her senses that math is for boys, and thus, a more admirable pursuit than humanities, which are for girls, and thus, easy.
But the stomachaches begin midway through her freshman year of high school.
Doctors suggest it has something to do with puberty; generic-brand period pain.
Some days, after lunch, Eve finds she can’t stand from the cafeteria table without passing out.
She takes to not eating at school, which makes the counselor refer her to an eating disorder specialist.
Sophomore year, she starts getting dizzy. “Like standing inside of a bell that someone’s just hit with a hammer,” she says. The doctors wonder if she might have vertigo. They suggest perhaps she is not consuming enough calories and again refer her to an eating disorder specialist.
She is checked for all of it: POTS and endometriosis and PCOS and depression and celiac and hypothyroidism and hyperthyroidism and IBD and stomach ulcers and lactose intolerance.
Every time a new doctor suggests a new condition, Eve googles with trepidatious glee.
These horrible symptoms could be hers! She could belong to a community of equally unwell people!
Without fail, she does not have the condition.
Seemingly, she has nothing. The specialists begin suggesting lightly, then more forcefully, that perhaps the root of Eve’s unwellness is Eve.
Her parents begin to refer to it as the “Great Malaise.” Eve starts to hope she has something awful, something really tragic, because she wants proof of her nociception more than she wants to be okay.
Their longtime family physician, Dr. Swann, becomes a semiregular fixture in the Olsen home.
She is brusque and bossy and not entirely sympathetic to Eve’s predicament, but she also never hints that she does not believe Eve’s predicament.
She also has absolutely no patience for Phillip.
Dr. Swann is Eve’s first evidence that a woman can be uncowed by her father.
In the era of the Great Malaise, Eve falls behind in her math classes.
She is moved from the very advanced class to the advanced one, then from the advanced one to the normal one.
She drops out of dance, which she has done since she was three, and takes to carting around the old acoustic guitar Julian received—and never learned to play—for his thirteenth birthday.
And for the first time in a long time—ever, perhaps—Eve is able to sit side by side with uncertainty.
Good art does not answer questions. It asks them. Good art is not certain; it’s curious.
The day she writes her first song, she eats a piece of peanut butter toast and passes out rising from the kitchen table.
She goes to her room when she can and lies on her bed and cries: at the thought that this will be her life forever, that she has no agency, that this is, in fact, all in her head.
The ceiling swirls above her. She is convinced she can see words written there, or music notes, a whole song arriving fully formed.
When she closes her eyes, she falls asleep, and when she opens them, the song is gone.
So she sits on the floor of her bedroom and writes her own.
She does not have answers. She does not have proof. But what she does have—what no one can take away from her—is purpose.
And then, when two years have gone by, it all stops.
The Great Malaise ends. Dr. Swann stops coming.
There will never be a diagnosis—that’s just one of those things you have to content yourself with.
Her parents say she outgrew it, as if it were a bad habit or an old pair of tennis shoes.
They hoped that when she outgrew her symptoms, she would also outgrow music, becoming once more the daughter who will cleave to their plans.
But in the depths of her pain, Eve finds something: an unshakable faith in her own experience of the world. No one can tell Eve who she is. No one can tell Eve how to feel.