New Disordered Reading: free 37 inch mini zine about my first haircut in 5 years

Dear Zine Reader,

It turns out some of you didn’t receive the promised DISORDERED READERS ANONYMOUS sample and discount code. Sorry, my bad. I think I’ve fixed the issue now.

For anyone who missed it first time around, I’ve included that again below.

In other news, I just got my first haircut in 5 years (!). Obviously, I made a mini-zine about it, a free copy of which is included with every order over the Easter weekend.

I say “mini”, but the zine is 37 inches long; the exact length of my hair after 5 years without a cut.

Why did I leave it so long between trims? It’s a long story….

You’d have to read the zine the find out and, to do that, you just need to pick up any other full-size zine or some sew-on patches from Ko-Fi before Tuesday.

If you’re yet to use your Disordered Readers Anonymous discount code (‘RABBITHOLE’ – very Easter-appropriate), you could enjoy the contrast of pairing your tiny zine with my biggest zine yet (did I mention DR-Anon is 96 pages?). The offer is valid with everything though – including DR-Anon’s sister zine, Trainwreck Book Club, these ‘Hottest Mess in the Library’ / ‘Hottest Mess in Book Club’ patches, the Confessions of an Ex-Zine Editor series, and the small, furry (yes, literally – the front cover is furry), Zine Fair Bingo.

Anyway, onwards with the DR-Anon sample. If you were one of the lucky ones who got this first time around, before I mucked up the mailing list settings, feel free to skip.

“Beer. Because no great story ever started with someone eating a salad” – ancient pub chalk board proverb

This is a zine about the sober years I spent in search of a story pub signwriters claim can’t be written; the worthy sequel that starts with a salad.

It’s about getting into the best physical shape of your life while quietly losing your mind.

It’s about trying to solve an identity crisis by hitting the books.

It’s about powerwalking so far in search of a guidebook on how to get away from yourself that you end up meeting yourself back in the same spot you started from.

It’s about getting lost in the library and developing some very disordered reading habits along the way.

By the time I went in search of the worthy sequel that starts with a salad I had become a connoisseur of another, more familiar, sort of a story; the sort that starts with a beer and swiftly graduates through a variety of other vices, before ultimately ending badly. These tales – concerning crashes and excesses – had been my guidebooks for more than a decade. I had come to appreciate them with the geeky, greedy, glee that a lifetime CAMRA member, years of beer drinking expertise wobbling proudly above their belt, might afford a locally brewed bitter.

There are a few different names for those books. In the first zine in this series - a 64-page monster-baby titled ‘Trainwreck Book Club’ - I chose to call them Trainwreck Books. It was a reference to the guilty, rubbernecking-at-a-Wreck thrills that these tales have often inspired in me. A homage to the powerful pull they exert over readers who should know better.

Other Disordered Readers have their own names for the genre. Writing about her own troubled relationship with these tomes in the cultural history of eating disorders, Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm, the essayist Emmeline Clein admits to a tendency to “misread a memoir as a manual”, saying of her favourite memoirists, “my muses were cautionary tales I mistook for role models”. Telling her readers she is striving for honesty in Dead Weight, Clein confesses “I’ve always wanted to live the kind of life that ends up in a story, but those are fiction”.

The memoirist Margo Steines has read many of the same ‘manuals’ as Clein, but she chooses to call them ‘inspirations’. Marya Hornbacher’s infamous 1998 eating disorder memoir Wasted is cited as an influence on Steines’ own memoir. Brutalities. In Brutalities, Steines charts experiences with addictions, segueing into eating disorders, segueing into overtraining and – at the heart of it all - recovery gone terribly awry. Speaking to Carl Erik Fisher on the Flourishing After Addiction podcast, Steines praises Wasted for the way it “explains this very intricate experience of complete disorientation and powerlessness”. Although Fisher admits he is not familiar with the book, he immediately knows the genre being discussed once Steines informs him “Wasted got sort of famous because it was banned in hospitals because people would use it as a sort of manual”.

“Oh, interesting!”, Fischer purrs, animated by sudden recognition. It turns out that he knows Steines’ dangerous ‘inspirations’ as Banned Books. He offers “where I was sent to rehab, you were not allowed to touch Augusten Burroughs Dry, because that would supposedly inculcate you into bad behaviour”. Where John Galliano went to rehab, The Guardian reports that Keith Richards’ autobiography Life was the book that got confiscated from his treatment centre suitcase.

Whatever heading you shelve them under – Trainwreck, ‘Inspiration’, Cautionary-Tale-cum-Role-Model, or relapse-inciting Books they Ban in Rehab – all you really need to know is that have I have followed these books right to the end. To the end of the tracks. To rehab.

But that’s a story for the previous zine. The Trainwreck Book Club zine, which was about the tendency for autistic girls’ like me to befriend books and treat them as trusted guides to a world where no-one wants to share the cryptic rules of engagement. I developed these reading habits young. As a strange child, I befriended Lewis Carroll’s Alice, associating deeply with her immersion in a society where nothing made sense, and striving to mimic her methods for navigating the confusing customs of Wonderland. My favourite Alice adventures were found in Through the Looking Glass, where Alice meets kings who communicate in mirror writing and catches trains to places where you can forget your own name.

I’m not the only young, neurodivergent reader to find herself captivated by the idea of such destinations. In The Autistic Alice, Joanne Limburg uses Lewis Carroll’s fantasies as the starting point for a suite poems describing a childhood that often left her feeling like an alien. In Woman of Substances: A Journey into Drugs, Alcohol and Treatment, the journalist Jenny Valentish - who was finally diagnosed with ADHD in her late 30s, having self-medicating since her early teens - recalls the revelation that followed a first raid on her parents’ drinks cabinet. “Very soon I felt my DNA intertwining with alcohol... hungry for information, I took out library books on drugs. Uppers. Downers. Psychedelics. A world of possibilities stretched out in front of me. You mean to say that if I take this little pill, just like Alice in Wonderland I will change entirely?”.

Like Valentish, I fell in with a bad crowd at the library in my moody teens. The Bell Jar, Girl, Interrupted, Junk and Wasted started my lifelong trainwreck reading habit rolling. Those books introduced me to other bad influences and, in time, I met my Top Three Trainwreck Books. My Unholy Trinity, who I introduced in the first zine in this series, consists of Cat Marnell’s How To Murder Your Life, Dorian Bridges’ Millennium Gothic and Fern Brady’s Strong Female Character. I followed my favourite trainwreck books all the way to treatment and, after realising that the three books I associated most strongly with were all the work of neurodivergent women or non-binary writers, I also followed them to my late autism diagnosis.

That’s the story of Trainwreck Book Club. This story - the sequel - is about what happens after a trainwreck. It’s about reaching the end of the well-worn (story)line and looking for the next book in the series. It’s about the strange tension you feel at the final pages of an intense thriller; the place where the relief of plot resolution mixes with rising anxiety, as the book’s imminent end threatens you with a return to reality and the task of searching for your next read. Book nerds know that the end of a really gripping book is a bittersweet and superstitious time. Choose your next read wisely and you can be on a glorious roll, skipping from recommendation to rabbithole as one title leads to another. Choose wrong and you may stall a few chapters in, turning reading from ‘one more page’ to one more chore, at least until you abandon the dud and hop on another thrill ride. This story is about scouring the library for new guidebook - a new friend, in the language of autistic readers – and failing to find her.

What do you call this elusive slower, steadier sequel? The more wholesome friend who subsists on salads, not stimulants? Makers of stock photos call her ‘woman laughing with salad’, but many wise cynics call the makers of stock photos liars, and their laughing woman a mirage. On chalk boards across the nation, publicans tend to agree, calling these salad stories ‘impossible’. In a thread titled ‘can you write a great story beginning with a salad?’ the writers of Reddit’s r/writingprompts call them a ‘challenge’. Those who have risen to the challenge and made it as far as a publisher will find their work called many things by librarians.

Self-help, fiction, social sciences, dummies guides, spirituality, cookbooks and memoirs were all shelves I arrived at when I started to make this zine and search in earnest for the guidebook, and friend, who I’d failed to locate in the years I most needed her. In her absence, I became lost and lonely during that time. This zine is an attempt to retrospectively make sense of that season of wandering in the library.

And it was a season of wandering….

… because if you think mistaking a misery memoir for a life manual is the misguided behaviour of a lost soul, you’ve seen nothing yet. Just wait until you see how lost my species of obsessive, excessively and over-literal bookworm can get without any sort of manual or guidebook at all.

Want to stay onboard for the next chapter? 
 
You can find the full 96 page zine (inc. bookmark, googly eyed cover, hand-stamped library ticket, and 83 book recommendations) here on Ko-Fi.

For a 15% discount, use the code ‘RABBITHOLE’.

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