Book Review: Worthless

Title: Worthless 

Author: Tanya Mills

Date: 2022

Publisher: T. Mills (via Book Baby)

ISBN: 978-1-66785-103-7

Quote: 

"Don't give me the poems

With beauty and light

They mean nothing to me

Give me the poems

With darkness and despair

That set my soul free."

This is a book of poems for and about women who are "depressed." The medical insurance industry currently prefers to think that these women are suffering from a physical disease. That's not what the narrators in these consistently first-person, short, unhappy poems describe. None of them mentions a physical symptom.

What most of these women say, unambiguously, is that they are unhappy about a reality problem. They all loved men too much, too soon. They didn't make these men work to win their love. They rushed into these men's arms, made commitments, then felt terribly disappointed that the men didn't rush to match their eagerness to commit. They were "liberated" from those older, less "feeling" influences that might have advised them to curb their hormones, cultivate lives of their own, have something to offer before they offered anything to any man. As a direct result of this false "liberation" they're now trapped in misery, blaming themselves for not having had even more to throw at the feet of unworthy men or, in slightly more lucid moments, for not having attracted better men. 

"I wake up and you are gone 

And I think it's just my fate

That people keep moving on

It may just be too late

For me to catch up to you

No matter how hard I try

And maybe it's the truth

I am better off not knowing why."

The "people" who "keep moving on," using and abandoning these women, are all men. Only sexual love seems to mean anything to these women. They don't seem to have children, nor do they mention having friends or parents. None of them ever mentions any interests of her own. They want to live for emotional gratification, and they want all of that gratification to come to them from men who've been brought up believing that all they have to do in life is lie on the couch letting other people meet their "needs" and praise these men if they manage to eat a vegetable or throw a ball, 

It's not that young women who are not living with this specific kind of "depression," or women who've managed to become "older" without it, won't feel some empathy for these women while reading Worthless. We should. Everybody has felt some of the pain of rejection, on some level. It's unpleasant enough when people reject our sales pitches, withhold tips, send back our manuscripts. Because the pain of offering oneself "body and soul," as the speakers in these poems do, and being rejected on that level is obviously even worse than the pain of not getting the job or the promotion, people who care about young women like these speakers feel a need to speak to them severely, in dire tones of warning:

"Giving yourself" completely, right away, is of course the formula for a "love" that will Go Wrong, leaving the women who seek so desperately to be loved by men alone with their broken hearts. "My heart cries for you nightly," one woman assures a man who, if he reads that line, probably asks himself whether a different country is far away enough. "Crying on the floor," another woman is. "[T]he tears roll / Down my cheeks." "I have nothing left to give." "I gave body and soul." One pleads, "So don't...leave me crying in an alley / In a bad part of town," having willfully forgotten that "a bad part of town" is traditionally defined by being where women who throw themselves at men's feet generally get kicked away to.  

Though the cover image is of a very pretty young woman, the type who might get a man to use her for one night despite her repulsive way of thinking, these poems define unattractiveness, Older women don't go back to college in order to be elected Homecoming Queen, but it's a rare woman who takes a college course after age twenty-five without picking up a few twenty-year-old admirers. Women who are disfigured, obese, or wheelchair-bound likewise have admirers. Women with prison records do, even if they were guilty, and even if they admit it. But "Little Miss Needy," the emotional black hole who throws herself at men "body and soul," asking for nothing first but expecting eternal love and fidelity forever after, may well launch a thousand ships--all of them sailing away, as far and as fast as they can go. 

And although the men are to blame for taking advantage of Little Miss Needy's hormones (she is obviously unfit to care for a child), it is hard to blame them for being so terrified by her cravings for "love." What is there to love about a Little Miss Needy? Oh, well, the hormones supply physical attractiveness, at least until she gets pregnant. There's the long hair, the smooth skin, the trim little waistline, and Little Miss Needy probably spent her teen years staring into mirrors and studying how to maximize the appeal of all these attributes. A young man can spend one or even two evenings just adoring her physical attributes. After that, well, how much is there to say about hair, however raven the waves or golden the ringlets. In cultures where society expected young men to appreciate their brides' beauty, spend a few weeks begetting their heirs, then go off to sea or to war and very likely never return, the ability nature has given young men to impregnate Little Miss Needy might have been useful for the survival of the tribe. But a physical attraction, especially after it's been gratified, is a very different thing from love. 

Little Miss Needy's exes might even be writing their own stories somewhere, of how they woke up the next morning with one of those golden ringlets trailing around their necks and felt that they were choking and had to get away before those eyes they were gazing into, the night before, opened to see them. ("I saw your love for me die / All I had to do was look in your eyes," says the woman in one of Mills' poems.) The recriminations to which even eye contact is sure to lead will be too much to bear. Men project all sorts of horrific fantasy images onto Little Miss Needy the next day; her hair becomes a mat of seaweed trapping them in an undertow, her pliant body becomes a trap, her rose-red lips seem to drip with their blood. 

There is an alternative but it requires some work, from both halves of the couples who achieve misery by seeking physical satisfaction too soon. Hormones are like fire--a good servant and a bad master. We all have to say no to our bodies. (Even in primitive societies, anthropologists report, there's a universal recognition that feeling and resisting sexual desire is part of growing up.) Those of us who want to be happy, or at least not depressed young women and angry young men, will probably have to live with peer pressure as well as hormonal pressure to commit ourselves too soon. We have to have lives of our own that lovers can want to share. We have to have something to offer--not merely a "dowry" of family money, either--something that we can do and be, that lovers can continue to find interesting after they've seen our physical "charms." We have to liberate ourselves from the craving to be loved for long enough to become lovable. 

That's the positive sermon. Worthless is the negative sermon preached to the same audience. Though one of Mills' speakers mentions "pills that stop me / From going insane," none of them is insane, or seems to be in real danger of becoming so. They all know what's going on around them; their poems are not about where they live or what day it is, but if asked they'd know the answer to those questions; they are not hallucinating or going into trance states. They are just very unhappy with the bad choices they've made. 

Novelists may have some excuse for their obsession with one kind of happy ending. "Jill laid her head on Jack's shoulder" sounds just a little bit more exciting than "Jill got up and went to work, stopped at the library on the way home, then went home, ate the mango that had been ripening on the window sill, and washed a load of laundry." One mark of a good novelist would be the person's ability to convince young readers that Jill might in fact feel bliss while washing the laundry. The book she's reading, the favorite song on the radio, or just the satisfaction of seeing her own tidy little room furnished with her own things, could trigger a surge of calmer but equally happy biochemicals just as easily as hugging a man could. All of the narrators of all of the poems in Worthless could benefit from savoring the pleasures of housekeeping, studying, cooking, reading, walking, and just appreciating wherever it is that they live. If they protest (and they might) that those pleasures sound "lonely," well, that kind of loneliness is the matrix in which real friendships form.