Many times as I wrote and re-read and turned the pages, I felt guilty and uncertain that the words I was using, in the order they were in, in sentences that sometimes felt like small, beautiful hammers trying to make poetry out of violence, were words that belonged out in the open, where everyone could see them, and possibly (uncomfortably) relate to. But his story – Maxi’s smiling, sick-grinned tragedy – wouldn’t leave me alone.
The trauma I felt over time at witnessing so many others’ acts and feelings of trauma, twisted and turned and formed naturally into Maxi’s voice, Maxi’s situation.
Can the caring, psychiatric profession help everyone? Should it help everyone? What happens when helping someone makes things worse? Who is responsible for the error? Who is responsible for the terrible consequences of trying to help someone and making a disaster out of it, whether accidental or intended?
Writing A Kick In The Gurus often felt like a lumpy blend of hallucinating, laughter therapy, inciting a crime or ten, and denial, while simultaneously being fed lies by a therapist or even anti-helped and held down against one’s will by a saviour who would fix me whether I wanted to be fixed or not – whether I was fixable or not.
I imagine reading it might be a similar experience. Readers have had two broad responses to A Kick In The Gurus.
- Falling feverishly into a joy-ride, oncoming car, over the speed limit read within a few hours;
- Needing to put the book down every few chapters to take respite from the themes and action raised by Maxi’s malignant path to growth. You may wish to journal any themes that feel either too personal or too improbable.
No one that I know of has read it moderately. I think this mirrors the way I personally responded to and assimilated the multiple experiences of the wounded and in-repair lives I was privileged to try and help while working in psychiatry for a decade. Sometimes gallows-humour helped us survive; other times, it stayed in the mind and kept you awake for months, or else filtered into the strangest dreams.
Do you love thinking? Do you have issues? If you love the feeling of being engrossed in crazed, breathless, important fiction, if you want some perspective on how actually, the lockdown could have been worse, you could have been inside Maxi’s head for real, then start reading A Kick In The Gurus today. I promise you, it will be a book you will never forget for the rest of your life.
Maclean Mottram 