Caren Beilin

From the author of Blackfishing the IUD, a darkly hilarious novel about familial trauma, chronic illness, academic labor, and contemporary art. In the tradition of Rabelais, Swift, and Fran Ross—the tradition of biting satire that joyfully embraces the strange and fantastical—and drawing upon documentary strategies from Sheila Heti, Caren Beilin offers a tale of familial trauma that is also a broadly inclusive skewering of academia, the medical industry, and the contemporary art scene. One day Iris, an adjunct at a city arts college, receives a terrible package: recently unearthed letters that her father had written to her in her teens, in which he blames her for their family’s crises. Driven by the raw fact of receiving these devastating letters not once but twice in a lifetime, and in a panic of chronic pain brought on by rheumatoid arthritis, Iris escapes to the countryside—or some absurdist version of it. Nazi cows, Picassos used as tampons, and a pair of arthritic feet that speak in the voices of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet are standard fare in this beguiling novel of odd characters, surprising circumstances, and intuitive leaps, all brought together in profoundly serious ways.

Revenge of the Scapegoat

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Women's Studies. BLACKFISHING THE IUD is a daring and demanding memoir by author, Caren Beilin, about reproductive health and the IUD, gendered illness, medical gaslighting, and activism in the chronic illness community. Rhapsodic and unabashedly polemical, Beilin scrutinizes the literary, artistic, and medical history of Rheumatoid Arthritis, as she considers the copper IUD's role in triggering her sudden onset of chronic autoimmunity. As the title makes abundantly clear, the book is an argument that the copper IUD is sickening quite a lot of women--and that we listen first and foremost to women's testimony to begin to resolve it. "BLACKFISHING THE IUD is a necessary and searing polemic. Deftly shifting between literary history and emerging scientific research, Caren Beilin defiantly insists on the truth of her own experience--and demands that medicine take the anecdotal reports of women like her seriously."--Maya Dusenbery As I read I thought of alchemy, Beilin is an alchemist. She transmutes metal, in this case copper, into something that flames and sings and questions and fights. It's a supranatural work that quests after healing but also finds and makes sense in its paradoxes."--Johanna Hedva "'Love does leave you open,' Caren Beilin proves in this heart-breaking, book-breaking work. Beilin opens her memoir of illness to the voices of others harmed by the IUD, a medical device that makes the writer's daily living and thinking into a story of autoimmune disease. Beilin and others who know the risks of being heard and treated as women include us in their generous acts of rage, empathy, gratitude, and information. Reading and writing are witchwork, transforming the isolation of suffering into a tender and common ground. This book reminds us that our bodies are sites of language we can trust and love and offer in forms more radical than we know."--Hilary Plum "In BLACKFISHING THE IUD, Caren Beilin takes on a crucial topic heretofore only broached in online forums--the serious, ongoing health problems associated with the copper IUD--and explodes her investigation into a creative work like no other: rich with wide-ranging references but also retaining the urgency and intimacy of raw, personal forum posts. Dissatisfied with the non-answers offered by medicine, Beilin seeks to understand the harm done by the IUD through philosophy, literature, and daily life. By writing the IUD through literature, philosophy, bookselling, and birdwatching, she identifies it as a problem that reaches far beyond 'women's health' into society at large."--Amy Berkowitz

Blackfishing the IUD

"Remember when we were young and first dreamed of a life of writing? It would be like living as a spy, or in a movie. Life suddenly made sense and could be endured insofar as it could be written. Pain and humiliation could be used. People, good and evil, were characters. Everywhere clarified lush, miraculous images. Not a word, a moment, would be again lowly. In the center was the dream of the writing, taking shape as the unfolding encyclopedia of our lives--heroic, magical, wise. At some point, we actually began to live that life, yet with the humiliation and miraculousness warped. Our mothers and fathers are dead. Everything has burned or is gone with the wind. What remains is the encyclopedia, from which Caren Beilin's writings have been torn--more hallucinatory, masturbatory and sociopathic, while also more bold, brave and beautiful, than our minds once conceived. AMERICANS, GUESTS, OR US is the realization and destruction of the dream. And we are within it, animal and timeless: inhabitants, strangers, the writing, the vengeance; the heartrock of Earth's outer space." --Brandon Shimoda "Harsh and sexy and at all times uniquely American." --Jesse Bercowetz

Americans, Guests, Or Us

A darkly funny, electrifying tale of polyamory, medical malfeasance and Carrie Bradshaw, written with utterly singular flair and style. Cumin Baleen is a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia – a city of hospitals – who works at the upscale market Sea & Poison, and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition. To start a course of medicine that might help, an eye exam is required, which leads to a nightmarish laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, making her language spare and her sentences clause-less, a vexing constraint that stalls her book on gynecological malpractice: she wants others, in the realm of this for-profit medical industry, to see poison. Meanwhile, Cumin is kicked out of her boyfriend Mari’s studio after he falls for Janine, their landlord, and starts renting a closet in Maron’s bedroom – polyamorous Maron who is hooking up with Alix, whom Cumin lusts after. Dishevelled from medicines and medical scams, unmoored from the reality she once knew, she begins to crack – in more ways than she can imagine… ‘Exhilarating… this rewarding and uncompromising novel is distinguished by its deliriously wild writing. It’s impossible not to be swept up in Beilin’s wake.’ Publisher’s Weekly (starred) ‘Caren Beilin is one of the most bizarre and fearless writers of her generation’ Catherine Lacey ‘I was instantly won over by Beilin’s writing – so funny and serious and playful. Her books have the natural authority of those artworks that are strictly, rigorously themselves’ Sheila Heti ‘An absurdist masterpiece. Nothing, just nothing, is as wild, outrageous and free as Sea, Poison’ Amina Cain

Caren Beilin

About

Books

Join the club