Crossing the Line: On Heather Lewis's "Notice"
"I would give them all they need/Everything they know and read/But they must cross the line."
I first heard of Heather Lewis in 2011 in Bellingham, Washington to give a talk on Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” (What a time.)
I was brought in by Western Washington University, where I met professor and writer Carol Guess who, at some point in the evening, mentioned Heather Lewis and her work and the sad fact that she had killed herself before I could even hear of her. I left Bellingham determined to find Heather’s work, so I started with House Rules, which is apt as it was her first novel. Just as I’d hoped, I connected with her writing—both content and style. I sought out the other two books she’d published, The Second Suspect and Notice, and made it a personal mission, of sorts, to make sure other people know her work, especially as she’s not here to promote herself.
I wrote this review of the new edition of Notice for a publication where two editors unknowingly assigned the same review. As mine was assigned secondarily, I was given it back to publish elsewhere. The book came out yesterday, so I’m publishing it here on my Substack without a paywall because I want to continue to have it on the record: Heather Lewis was here.
Crossing the Line: On Heather Lewis's "Notice"
In an essay from her 1994 collection Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, And Literature, Dorothy Allison writes about sending a piece of "fiction" (quotations hers) about incest and adult sexual desire to a friend who was, at the time, a "respected feminist editor and activist." The friend, Allison writes, asked what kind of response Allison wanted—editorial, personal, literary, or political?
“Certainly, I wanted my story to move her,” Allison writes. “[I wanted] to show her something about incest survivors, something previously unimaginable and astounding. What did I want? I wanted the thing all writers want—for the world to break open in response to my story."
The world did break open a little bit for Allison when her novel Bastard Out of Carolina was published in 1992. The book's themes of Southern familial violation and violence were met with high praise and curiosity as Allison's protagonist, Bone, was a fictionalized version of herself and all she'd endured in adolescence. In an interview with the New York Times, Allison said she'd made Bone "a stronger child than I was, and—more importantly—I gave her a way out."
"The difference," she said, was that in fiction, "you can build in a lot of hope that you don't have in real life."
Readers have a hard time with hopelessness. Ambiguity is fine, but the depressive lull of dispassion is almost too much to bear.
Memoirists are tasked much the same to find a path toward resolve where one might not exist. In her 1997 memoir The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison detailed her adult romantic and sexual relationship with her father, leaving off where she cuts off contact with him and has a reconciliation in a dream about her dead mother. The New York Times praised The Kiss as "a powerful piece of writing, a testament to evil and hope."
Heather Lewis is harder to swallow. A Bedford, New York-raised Sarah Lawrence graduate who fell into the East Village writing scene of the early '90s, Lewis's first novel, House Rules, was published when she was 28. Just two years after Bastard Out of Carolina, House Rules shared similarities in themes of adolescent trauma, escapism through vice, and thinly veiled versions of the authors and their families.
House Rules largely takes place on the horse-jumping circuit like the one Lewis participated in as a teen. Her 15-year-old protagonist, Lee, is looking to escape her father's advances at home and takes solace in sex with older women, methadone, and physical pain. (Lewis, according to mentor and friend Allan Gurganus, liked to "joke" that the breeders and owners of the horses she rode considered her a "crash test dummy.")
Lewis's debut was given high marks—"Brutal, sensual, honest, and seductive," Kirkus called it. A six-figure advance followed for the follow-up, which, though not necessarily a sequel, meant to pick up where House Rules left off.
Initially titled Wives in early drafts, Notice was a first-person account of a young woman's fugue and hypersexual state after an adolescence spent enduring her father's off-page transgressions. In the introduction for the new edition of Notice from Semiotext(e), Melissa Febos writes that, in terms of "copious, violent, and arousing" sex that both scared and intrigued her, House Rules "has nothing on Notice."
Too brutal, perhaps, too violent, honest, and arousing, Notice couldn't find a publisher until 10 years after Lewis first wrote it.
Despite the advance, the manuscript was turned down by 18 publishers who deemed it too dark for American audiences. Even after contrarian Katie Roiphie included House Rules alongside Bastard Out of Carolina and several other books by writers as accomplished and scandalous as Margaret Atwood and Mary Gaitskill in her Harper's trend report "Making the Incest Scene," there was still uncharted territory.
It's worth noting that even Gaitskill found House Rules too scary and dark for her liking.
With Notice, Lewis had crossed the line.
Notice opens with an epigraph from Nico's song, "Sãeta": "At a crossing of the line, everything you need is mine.”
The song was considered a dark turn for the former Chelsea Girl—a post-punk proto-goth tune recorded in Italy in 1981 and released as a single in America in 1983. By then, Lewis was a regular at CBGB and had befriended Nico after they met backstage at a club in New Jersey. "Nico was wearing a brown silk dressing gown which inspired Heather to search high and low until she found one just like it," writes Lewis's partner, Ann Rower, in her new story collection If You're a Girl, published with Semiotext(e) this April.
In her introduction to Notice, Febos cites an essay Lewis contributed to a 1999 essay collection, A Woman Like That: Lesbian and Bisexual Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories, where she writes that her obsession with seeing Patti Smith led her father to believe she was sleeping with the androgynous rock star. ("I wish," Lewis wrote, "but my groupie skills were not that developed.) Lewis's father sent his daughter to a shrink who, diagnosed Lewis as a "Virginia Woolf time bomb," prescribing a succession of antipsychotics and deciding she would "certainly kill [her]self by the time she was 40."
And she did. By the time Notice was first published by Serpent's Tail in 2004, Lewis had been dead for two years.
"Everything is a big vision/A decision must be signed." - Nico, "Sãeta"
The rejection from the publishing industry was heartbreaking. Even fans and friends "could hardly stand to read it," Rower writes—"not just because the sex was so rough, to put it mildly, so violent, but worse: because the tone was so flat. Heather's genius creation was the voice of a horrible abused long woman who spoke dispassionately about the shocking scenes of her own abuse."
The narrator of Notice is nameless, though she offers the working name "Nina" to Ingrid, the wife of a sadist who picked her up in the train station parking lot. That's where the narrator—"Nina"—turns tricks, but not just for the cash. "What the extra need is, the thing besides money? I've never pinned it down," the narrator says on the first page. "I know it's there, though."
Whatever that need is, it drives the narrator to the train station parking lot, not unlike the one Lewis worked in White Plains near her family's home in Westchester. When a client invites "Nina" home, the narrator agrees. For one, he was a rough guy, and that was hard for her to pass up. "Not for the reasons you may think, but because that thing pulls me," the narrator says. "And then, too, he'd dangled a carrot, which was his wife."
The first section of Notice follows the narrator into the home of sadistic businessman Gabriel and his tortured wife, Ingrid, where it becomes quickly and painfully clear that the narrator is participating in the reenactment of the rape and murder of the couple's 16-year-old daughter. The narration of the chokeholds and violent fucks "Nina" endures is delivered without any amount of hand-holding—Lewis isn't looking to spare readers from the horrific reality lurking in suburbia. She certainly wasn't spared.
Even when the narrator and Ingrid are playing house or stealing moments of intimacy without the direction of the tyrannical husband, the narrator's stoic recollection and attraction to dangerous scenarios force readers to endure their own feelings. In especially difficult passages, Lewis's stark descriptions feel as cold and steely as the gun between her legs.
It's a mistake to say the narrator is passive—the boundaries of consent are as blurry as her waking life, but the decisions she makes and even the way she thinks are so dangerously palpable that readers have no choice but to draw the line for themselves, even when Lewis and her narrator cannot.
When the narrator does finally leave Gabriel and Ingrid's home, she's soon entrapped and institutionalized. Placed in isolation for several months, she's raped by guards, and her relationship with a therapist named Beth turns sexual in further transferrence. Despite a fixation with her, Beth is not the saving grace "Nina" needs, nor is her release—there's no freedom from what holds her captive. She returns to the train station, disassociating as much as possible through sleep, drugs, alcohol, and a torrid relationship with her married counselor while Gabriel continues to exert his cruel power over her.
The doctor Lewis's father took her to should not be credited for his apt Virginia Woolf comparison. Surely he didn't mean to refer to Woolf, too, as a writer whose worldview was forever altered by incest.
Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo has made the case for Woolf's work being highly reflective of her traumatic experiences as a child, mainly at the hands of her step-brother, George. In her 1989 book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, found DeSalvo wrote about the children in Woolf's work who were ignored, neglected, and outright abused, in addition to Woolf's own documentation of her abuse in letters, journals and public conversation. Still, reviewers and biographers chose to focus on Woolf's "madness," in all of its gendered implications, frequently painting her adolescence as idyllic and privileged, failing to leave out that her depression was a response not only to the trauma but the drugs being used to treat her.
"A painstaking woman who wishes to retreat of life as she finds it and to give voice to some of the perplexities of her sex, in plain English, has no chance at all," Woolf said while writing her first published novel, The Voyage Out.
"She knew that behind the social masks that ordinary people wore, there were private sorrows," DeSalvo wrote of Woolf. "She understood that 'it is not part of the game to go that deep: that might be dangerous.'"
Heather Lewis wasn't afraid of danger. It was everyone else who was still too frightened to confront the realities of a life like the one she and Woolf and Allison lived: that heads of the household could destroy their daughters in a multitude of ways, wielding whatever power was necessary with lasting effects.
It was more palatable in those years that Notice could not be published for Lewis to rewrite the story into a detective novel told in the removed third-person. Despite reviews calling it "slick" and "sleek," The Second Suspect, which Rower writes was expected to be a "blockbuster" with Lewis's agent's eye towards a film adaptation, did not crack the world open in 1998. Instead, it fueled Lewis's downward spiral as she returned to alcohol after a long period of sobriety, and her mental health suffered.
In 2002, on the same first Saturday in May as the Kentucky Derby, Lewis hung herself in her friends' West Village apartment using the belt from the brown robe she'd bought to feel like Nico.
"Heather died, by her own hand, as most know, thinking of herself as a failure," Rower writes in a chapter called "Notice" in If You're a Girl.
When Notice was finally published by Serpent's Tail in 2004, Gurganus furnished an afterword that gave readers insight into both the story and its author.
"A classic symptom of any child enduring unwanted sexual attention is extreme dissociation. She becomes cut off from the warning proof of pain; she hurls herself at people, places, and things, oblivious to all interior alarms. Such signs are evident from this work’s beginning. The central character mistakes her own recklessness for enterprise. Her cockiness is as endearing as dangerous. Her free time and lack of guardian family ties render her a public person, sacrificial."
The narrator of Notice sees herself as playing a specific role—"to make people see something ugly inside. Take them to a place in themselves they didn't want to go but had to. Let them do this through me and then let them discard me, discount me."
Lewis's writing, rank and affecting in its remove, is too involving for readers who cannot stay present through the yelps of a lover being burned in the asshole by the lit end of a cigarette. But for those brave enough to experience the brutality quite literally painstakingly put into words, there is a gift. It's just not hope or a happy ending.
It's unclear what success would look like for Lewis, as we cannot ask her. But Notice and its new, highly-anticipated edition suggest she made a crack.
"I wanted to be understood finally for who I believed myself to be, for the difficulty and grief of using my own pain to justify myself," Dorothy Allison writes in Skin. "I wanted my story to be unique and yet part of something greater than myself. I wanted to be seen for who I am and still appreciated—not denied, simplified, lied about, refused, or minimized—the same thing I have always wanted."
"I would give them all they need/Everything they know and read/But they must cross the line."