Elizabeth Earley’s essay collection Little Deaths all in a Row (out September 16th) is a deeply vulnerable, deeply personal cosmology constructed from recollections of working hospice care, practicing Reiki, formative childhood experiences, and a myriad of sexual and romantic experiences spanning her life so far. She meshes these memories into a collage of concepts from cognitive science, biology, physics to try and address questions about intimacy, transience, and change. She is also curious about death.
The eponymous expression comes from a musing on the nature of death that will feel familiar to many tarot enthusiasts: not an ending but a change. A series of changes, of deaths in a sense, make up a life. What was it Clive Barker wrote? “We are all our own graveyards…we squat amongst the tombs of the people we are.” But while Barker evokes the emotionally weighted, religious yet macabre visuals of graveyards and tombstones, Earley’s background inspires her to map lived mutability onto an XYZ coordinate graph, to ponder on the interconnection of cell death with cell regeneration, and understand the body’s mutability as a site for hope and healing alongside the damages we incur by living. The traumas, to put it simply.
I most enjoyed how Earley’s descriptions of feelings are embodied, and how much her writing focuses on sensation. She writes about loss “tumbling” through her, words that “tickle”, and a body that feels “less solid” in water. I also appreciated the way she pairs her cosmological revelations with foundational experiences—we get an understanding of her inspirations and thought process that is insightful and engaging.
There were moments where I felt the science seemed cut carefully out of context to connect Earley’s theses and the recollections that frame them. While Earley seeks to locate and recognize her privileged positions, I feel like it could have been better practiced by acknowledging relevant bits of the history and context around the science mentioned. For example, the ways in which the use of psychoactive substances in the Amazon are ritualized and have preceding/preparatory spiritual practices that are not often engaged in by tourists, or the profiteering off Asian philosophy/spirituality in the name of a metaphysics landscape indivested from histories of scientific racism and ethnocentrism. I would have appreciated more discussion of these nuances—such as in the “Remains” essay, where a discussion of the Tuskegee Experiment and it’s semiotics complicates Earley’s interactions with a partner who refuses to get the COVID vaccine. It’s empathetic without being preachy, and human in showing the anxieties of both people without centering ego. That section, bookended by numbers, is poignant. While I understand that this book is deeply personal, I only wish there was a bit more of such nuance. Earley frequently recalls out of body experiences, and parts of her metaphysical cosmology feel similarly adrift from their philosophical and/or spiritual origins.
I will admit that the introduction (titled “invitation”) and some of the proceeding passages leave me hesitant to recommend the first two thirds to people who are not into metaphysical stuff (or tarot, for that matter). This earlier section will appeal to readers who understand their spiritual and scientific pursuits as more unified and fluid, e.g. neuroscientists who are interested in the concept of consciousness. It will also likely appeal to readers who align with Chani Nichols’s more expansive and care-oriented approach to astrology and fate (per my sample of one—my partner loves Nichols’s work and also enjoyed this book).
However, the last third was my favorite. It was about healing and connection, about reckoning with the past in the present to create fulfilling futures. This last third was also what I was expecting based on the blurb for this book. Ultimately, I appreciated how the intrinsic vulnerability of the subject (in every sense of the word) was articulated throughout. We all have “soft, wet insides” and carry scars, worry about the future and about sharing parts of ourselves with others. Earley’s book is more of an invitation than a declamation or declaration. It welcomes the reader to sit with their own feelings around the ideas I mentioned in the first paragraph of this review, and to consider where their own understanding of endings began.
Content warning: sexual assault, intimate partner violence, body image, death, illness, addiction, substance use
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