A young woman wakes in an unfamiliar white room. There is a name on the hospital bracelet – Anna – but “nothing attaches itself to the letters”. She has lost her self; “something has happened to her memory”. The reader recognises the cues more quickly than Anna does: this is a psychiatric institution, where Anna is told that she is recuperating after a round of electroconvulsive treatment – not her first. She has been a patient for six weeks: “Perhaps she has had this awakening many times before, her self split over and over again.”
The project of Anna Jacobson’s remarkable debut memoir, How to Knit a Human, is to record the splintering of her self and memory after a severe psychotic episode. Jacobson was the subject of an involuntary treatment order and several rounds of ECT, in the aftermath of which she experienced serious memory loss. She lost her autonomy too, for a time, and How to Knit a Human is less a memoir of recovery than of reintegration, and a powerful reclamation of that lost autonomy through art. As the book progresses, Jacobson shifts the narrative mode from an unknown and unknowable third person to a steady assertion of the first person.
Knitting is a form of knotting, a way to tie together many threads. It is an applied creative practice that evokes domesticity, thriftiness, warmth and relationships between women. Jacobson knits with her close friends on their crafternoons, she knits in occupational therapy, and she finds in knitting a guiding metaphor for reintegration: “The madness itself is a void that has no memory and I have had to knit and braid myself around its form.” This is a helpful gloss on the memoir itself, in which Jacobson braids multiple timelines and themes together.
The structural significance of knitting is signalled in the table of contents, which is a playful visual image of a piece of knitting, with forward slashes and back slashes serving as punctuation and illustration. Jacobson’s chapters are titled after knitting stitches, or pun on them, and are organised into three categories, Before, After and Cardea – the latter being the Roman goddess of the door hinge, and a cipher for Anna’s psychosis. Among her skeins are threads devoted to her grandparents and their flights from the Holocaust, to Jacobson’s encounters with psychologists and psychiatrists (most, but not all, are depicted as callous and impatient), to her attachments to her parents, brother and friends.
Braided into the memoir, too, is Jacobson’s exploration of her Jewish identity and her queerness, her discovery of a creative community, and the significance of mentors and teachers including David Stavanger, Felicity Plunkett and Kári Gíslason. There’s a lot of material to work with, and sometimes it gets a little tangled, especially in the final sections, which add to the braid Jacobson’s burgeoning and angry insights into the systemic problems with mental health care and the theory about psychiatric survivor life-writing that feeds into her PhD thesis.
If the title of this memoir suggests a kind of how-to guide for survivors of psychosis, it is grounded in creative practice and communities. Jacobson is an award-winning poet and visual artist – as well as being a dancer, musician, sculptor, diarist, knitter and inveterate archivist of the self. Her illustrations, most of them self-portraits, appear throughout How to Knit a Human and on the cover.
When Jacobson is discharged from hospital, she revisits artworks she has made, as well as her diaries, photographs and videos of her childhood, to salvage memories and bring her self into view. When she turns on her computer, she finds a new user profile named “surprise guest” with a blue macaw as its avatar. She can’t log in and comes to the conclusion that she created the avatar during her psychosis.
How To Knit a Human is riddled with such uncanny figures; just as we become accustomed to Jacobson’s measured voice, attuned to her delicate tonal shifts between earnest and deadpan, we are confronted with a startling metaphor – such as this bright blue macaw. At the psych ward she glimpses a photo on her file, a portrait of a girl with “witch-wild hair”. These figures frequently emerge from descriptions of Jacobson’s art-making. She sifts through photographs taken before her hospitalisation and “most remain a mystery, as though she’s staring at a fake memory where her doppelganger is placed”.
It is by working with the documentation of her life that Jacobson’s poetic practice develops. She takes a degree in creative writing and eventually pursues graduate study; she confronts the trauma of involuntary institutionalisation and ECT and the abyss of memory loss; she finds ways to transform her trauma into art. After one particularly lairy session with her psychiatrist, she writes: “I will find the beginning of a poem in my notes.”
We part company with Jacobson as she is finishing writing this memoir. She has been granted a PhD, with distinction. She has a record of her madness. “I’m not casting off,” she writes. “Frayed stitches are enough to restitch with air, with words.”
How to Knit a Human by Anna Jacobson is published by NewSouth ($34.99)
