Hannah Regel's 'The Last Sane Woman'
Art, parasociality, the 1970s, death, and women's letters
Foreword
As I explained a few weeks ago, I have decided to replace parts two and three of the Who Do You Think You Are book club with alternative programming on women writers. This week, I am writing on Hannah Regel’s debut novel, The Last Sane Woman, published by Verso last month. As I did with Miranda July’s All Fours, this is not so much a conventional review but rather a breakdown of five key observations gleaned from the text.
I was immediately drawn to Regel’s novel because of its consideration of women artists, threading a loop between the late-1970s/early 80s and the present day. Regel first introduces us to Nicola, a sculptor who is roughly a decade out of art school and working odd jobs in London, always on the edge of the art scene but never getting traction within it. When Nicola happens upon the archives of Feminist Assembly, she asks to read about “women who can’t make things” and is given a box of letters written by an anonymous potter to a childhood friend. The potter, who we learn is called Donna, becomes the other focus of Regel’s narration, as the novel flits between Nicola and Donna, twin flames across generations. Eventually, the opening of a chapter uses only “she” pronouns and no markers of time, stressing the possibility that the scene described could star either woman. Nicola becomes so attached to Donna that Donna’s own mental distress and anxiety crops up in Nicola’s work and life, becoming an all-consuming and potentially dangerous identification.
“I want to read about women who can’t make things.” This is how chapter one begins, with Nicola yearning for the unrealised, the unfinished, the unstarted art career that might mirror back her own. The theme of productivity is perhaps the novel’s most important one: not only does Regel foreground all of the reasons why an artist might be thwarted, ranging from economics to self-esteem, childcare, addiction, or unwillingness to play art world games, but she thinks about the need for everything to yield something that is perhaps a distinctly contemporary anxiety (and also gendered—maybe why women’s artistic practices have long been demoted to craft or hobbyism). For instance, Nicola is cajoled by her boyfriend into proposing an exhibition of Donna’s letters and remaining pots, since to him her time in the archives is otherwise simply wasteful. Even the pursuit of pleasure has to produce some kind of a product or public artifact, or at least a line on a CV/Instagram bio. Art is marshalled into doing or meaning something tangible—precisely the kind of utilitarian, machinic approach to art that Sontag scorned in “Against Interpretation.” I also wondered whether Regel’s interest in the non-generative had a life in the book’s structure, given the ambiguous—even narratively unsatisfying—end.
In Identification Papers (1995), scholar Diana Fuss writes about identification as “the detour through the other that defines a self”, that occurs through activities of displacement and substitution, where one exchanges and cannibalizes parts of the other in search of a (ultimately eluding) whole self. Nicola projects herself into Donna’s letters such that she no longer feels Donna (who remains conveniently anonymous to her) is writing, but that she is: “Nicola wasn’t just overhearing, she was being overheard!” Fuss suggests that identification begins as a means of mourning/managing loss, and so we can see how Nicola’s painful experiences of lack or disappointment with her life are overcome by the additive process of incorporation; for instance, Nicola starts to think of Donna as “her potter” rather than “the potter” in the archive.
Possession, then, becomes one way in which Regel thinks through an ethics of identification. At a certain point, people start asking Nicola whether she has tried to find out Donna’s name or locate any of her surviving friends and family. Nicola initially resists: “If the potter became a person, what would happen then? Nicola would be winched out and forced to work the fields of her own life, battered by harsh weather, and her well would be filled with the thick, completed concrete of someone else.” And later, when she takes the letters back to her flat: “what lay on her bed was not a pile of papers, but a person. What if that person rolled over? Parted the hair at the back of their head, and showed the woodlice writhing beneath.” The unpredictability of others makes them inconvenient and unmanageable to us, revealing our own anxieties and insufficiences in the face of change. Idealizing Donna makes her into a point of stability in precarious times—it is as if she exists (or existed) for Nicola. Regel is thus clear about the thorny side of adoration and identification, or the ways in which love and friendship can involve standing so close to someone that you actually lose sight of them: “Friendship. How hard you had to listen through the static of your own feedback for the truth of it. How if you weren’t careful the distortion could shift dimensions ever so slightly, make a death look like a life. How easy it was to read something wrong.”
Donna’s letters are written as the 70s become the 80s, a historical backdrop that feels very coordinated with her decline in career opportunities and eventual unwellness. At a New Year’s Party early in the novel, she and her artist friends pontificate about what they think the decade will be like. We know—just as we know early on that Donna dies young—that the 80s will bring Thatcherism, austerity, and the new neoliberal order, beginning with a decade of conservative slashing of arts funding that has had indelible ricochets even in the present. Regel’s choice of historical backdrop is no coincidence, then, but a smart knitting together of structural declines in social welfare and Donna’s own lethal isolation and poverty.
Similarly, in the present, Nicola is eventually convinced to ‘do something’ with the letters, but can’t understand why Susan refuses. Why, she wonders, would she want her friend’s letters to remain anonymous and up on a shelf, rather than being written about or exhibited? Nicola narrates a story of a girl in school who was recorded during sex and how the audio clip rushed around each class: “Privacy died the second Becca King spat out the pen lid she’d been chewing to shout Play it again, and the class, in unison, cried Yes!” That some things might remain private—that exposure is not flatly good—is a concept so unfamiliar to our generation, where every victory but also every flaw is optimized through hypervisibility. What are the affordances of ghostliness then, of not missing but perhaps escaping fame’s net? Is the solution to erasure always more exposure?
Hannah Regel’s debut novel The Last Sane Woman was published by Verso Books in July 2024. You can find out more here.
What I’m Reading:
Rattlebone by Maxine Clair
Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
What I’m Watching:
Love is Blind UK
Summer cinema diary to come
What I’m Writing:
A review of a new biography of an understudied Leftist writer and journalist who was active in the Dust Bowl (due later this fall)