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The heart is a peculiar organ. It wants what it wants, as Emily Dickinson wrote. Especially when you’re young and have no previous experience of love and desire, or the deleterious effects of time on both. This is the core subject of 24-year-old Harriet Armstrong’s debut novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, published by the consistently adventurous independent press Les Fugitives.
When the unnamed narrator, a third-year psychology student, meets fellow student Luke in their campus kitchen, she falls hard. They begin sharing meals and confidences in her room, which bears a “suicide beam” running the length of the ceiling. This memento mori is archly juxtaposed with the narrator’s breathless infatuation, which feels as if “some great transition was occurring inside me, something was aligning, I could actually feel it”. She finds herself “wide open and completely soft like a small trembling animal held in two hands, two hands which could crush it completely but which would not”.
Armstrong expertly adumbrates the emotional intensity and vulnerability of first love, with every page bearing a startling observation or wry aside. The world is made anew: “I had never seen a winter which was so yellow … before Luke I had never really felt gendered … Luke and I were inventing ourselves.” Of course, her loved one is filtered through her perceptions, and while he is intelligent and attractive, we can also see that he’s a self-involved, self-pitying young man, with all that entails. He leaves her dangling and fails to reciprocate her abundant, overflowing emotions. Unlike us, she can’t see him objectively. Nor can she see herself fully. While she’s aware that her self-conscious awkwardness is the result of her neurodivergence, she’s yet to gain the self-knowledge that might deter her from withholding men such as Luke.
And so we fear for her future the deeper she falls. What’s compelling is that unlike, say, Esther in The Bell Jar, the narrator has no perspective through which to filter her descent. At times the novel is unbearably intense, like experiencing the essence of obsession as it’s lived in every moment – which is not to say that it isn’t also very funny. Armstrong astutely atomises the gen Z world of online living and flat sharing: “I didn’t want to get up to go and make breakfast and be faced with some shirtless boy cooking ramen”. The passage where the narrator Googles vaginal dilators will, for a number of reasons, bring tears to the eyes. Armstrong’s voice is by turns jejune, candid and ludic, but always aware of its effects and its commitment to emotional truth.
The Cartesian split alluded to in the title is crucial. While cerebral and obsessively analytical, the narrator is equally fervent about engaging with the messily somatic: “Perhaps sex was a necessary component of the life that I wanted, perhaps some things really couldn’t be accessed at all except through sex.” Luke is ambivalent about her joining Tinder. And so she embarks on a series of tragic dates, losing her virginity with a thirtysomething comedian in a sex scene of almost surreal awkwardness, but written with such dark humour and insight that it ends up feeling triumphant.
Almost inevitably, Luke eventually turns away from her. Memories of their time together pour back “like some biblical flood or plague”. Eventually, it becomes “impossible to even breathe without thinking of Luke”. At the book’s close, she is invited to his 24th birthday party, aware that he’s moved on but unable to process the fact, leading to a searing denouement. The final scene is as deft and devastating as the conclusion to a Cheever story. While ostensibly belonging to the subgenre of novels about young women negotiating 21st-century relationships, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a world away from the derogatory label “sad girl lit”. It announces Armstrong as a bright and singular voice in literary fiction.
