Survival Mode: Review of Allie McFarland's Disappearing in Reverse
Allie McFarland, Disappearing in Reverse.
University of Calgary Press, 2020. $24.99 CAD.
Buy a copy from University of Calgary Press.
She is not dead. These are the haunting words that set off the main character’s journey in Allie McFarland’s debut novel, Disappearing in Reverse. We never learn her real name—and get the sense that she doesn’t really know who she is yet, either—but she’s certain it’s her cousin Devin in the recently posted photo. Consumed by guilt, believing it’s her fault Devin died, she is desperate to find her alive.
The story explores how we deal with grief, loss, and abandonment, and the ways we learn to cope—or not cope. Having never accepted Devin’s death, the narrator is fueled by the illusion that she could somehow still be alive. She wavers between denial and reality—and McFarland weaves plenty of hints throughout, casting doubt on whether Devin has really died. The narrator even recalls Devin saying she “wants to escape” (26), plotting to run away, and explaining how she could disappear in a crowded city.
But alongside the search for Devin, the narrator is also searching for herself. She is a picara: an autonomous woman, motivated by survival, hunger, sexual desire, and travel. The story is driven by specific episodes or scenes that follow her adventures on the road, giving detailed snapshots of the past and present. When we meet the narrator, she is—ironically enough—enrolled in a class on “self-regulation” at university. This is something that proves to be a challenge for her, and something she resists at every turn. She is reckless, impulsive, and rebellious: her professor notes her paper’s arguments are “Juvenile and underdeveloped” (3), and this observation isn’t entirely off-base. At least, that’s how society sees her—and to an extent, how she sees herself. She keeps the “adult” world at a distance, but also wants to be taken seriously. Indeed, she plays at being an adult throughout the novel, with unpredictable—and sometimes hilarious—results.
The narrator smashes coffee beans with a hammer and figures it’s “good enough”—she’s a terrible cook, can’t hold a job, and runs off without paying rent. And yet she doesn’t want her family to think she’s “completely incapable of living” (114) or give her “judge-y glares” (179). Despite proving that she can’t function as an adult in the way they expect, she insists “I can fucking take care of myself” (159). She struggles against constant infantilization—or what she perceives as such—as well as misogyny, like when a couple of men decide the fate of her car “as if the two of them are in charge and I’m an inconsequential annoyance” (83). For her, a car is freedom. Autonomy manifests in her ability to control a situation: through her sexuality, wit, cunning, or other means of survival.
It’s no surprise the narrator feels numbed and sedated by “the confines of suburbia” (151) and continues to rebel. She is a liar and a thief, whose behaviour borders—and sometimes crosses into—criminality. At one point, she even assaults a man in the hospital, manipulates her way out of being caught, and steals a car. She is alternately emotional and detached, compassionate and immoral. But as a thoroughly “undomesticated” woman, it’s like society doesn’t know what to do with her: she doesn’t know where she belongs, and neither do they.
In true picaresque fashion, the narrator points out the absurdity of society’s rules: in her stint at a funeral parlour, she comments “in two months she’ll be a skeleton and still dressed for work” (9). She alludes to the curated self of the digital age, the way “we always fabricate our stories” (11)—and unrepentantly blurs the lines between fact and fiction, life and death, past and present. She lives on the boundary—a precarious place to be, as she is acutely aware. “I don’t belong,” she says, and the story fluctuates between her wanting to find herself and erase herself (68).
If she doesn’t “fit,” where does she belong?
This is the ultimate question—at first, she is plagued by insecurity and self-consciousness. She feels like a failure, impersonates others, and doesn’t know what she likes or believes. Without Devin, she has lost her ability to relate to the world. The one person she trusted, who made her feel “worthy,” has left her: “and it’s like I was always alone,” she says (111). But as she finally starts to confront the past, she grows into her nature as a picara—including the tendency toward chaos.
The picara is, by definition, an outsider—she does not bow to stereotype or convention. There is a division between her and society, and she struggles with alienation. The narrator in Disappearing has an innate restlessness, a hunger for travel and adventure, and the search for Devin begins to feel “more like an excuse to wander away from home”.[1] She cannot ignore her compulsion, even as she admits there might be “something important about not leaving” (176). She never accepts responsibility or consequences—and nothing is more important than her autonomy, which she is determined to wrest from a reluctant society.[2]
The picaresque novel is not a common genre—there are few that feature a woman protagonist, and even fewer that are written by women. McFarland captures the essence of picara-hood and the frenetic energy of youth while giving us a truly unexpected central figure. Are we supposed to like her? It’s unclear—and also beside the point. Here we have a complex character, one who surprises you on every page. The kind that cishet men have always been given while the rest of us were deprived of the same “depth.” How many women in literature are considered anti-heroes? The narrator pushes the boundaries of what it means to be a “picara” because she simply refuses to be defined.
Can any of us deny the impulse to root for her?
[1] Senna, Danzy. “Oreo by Fran Ross is an Overlooked Classic About the Comedy of Race,” The New Yorker, 2015.
[2] Kaler, Anne K. The Picara: From Hera to Fantasy Heroine, 1991.
Jesse Holth is a writer, editor, and poet living on Lekwungen/Songhees and WSÁNEĆ territory. Her work has appeared in Room, Grain, CV2, and other publications. She previously served as Editor-in-Residence for The Puritan's Town Crier, Guest Editor for antilang., and Assistant Poetry Editor for The Tishman Review. She is currently working on two full-length collections.