Airless Spaces

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Short stories set among the disappeared and darkened sectors of New York City, about characters who fall prey to an increasingly bureaucratized poverty.After they raised her dose t o 42 mg. of Trilafon, Lucy very nearly fainted. She felt a rush of bad sensation comparable to her mental telepathy when her grandmother died ... But there was a good aspect to fainting too. As she was about to lose consciousness, she felt an overwhelming relief. The black velvety edges of the swoon. If only she could faint all the way, black out, and never wake up again ...Shulamith Firestone was twenty-five years old when she published The Dialectic of Sex, her classic and groundbreaking manifesto of radical feminism, in 1970. Disillusioned and burned out by the fragmented infighting within the New York City radical feminist groups she’d helped to found, when her book hit the bestseller lists, Firestone decided against pursuing a career as a “professional feminist.” Instead, she returned to making visual art, the profession that she’d trained for. She wouldn’t publish anything again until Airless Spaces, in 1998.Long before her first hospitalization for paranoid schizophrenia in 1987, Firestone had fallen off the grid and into precarity and poverty. For the next decade, she would move in and out of public psychiatric wards and institutions. Conceived as a series of vignettes about institutions and identity, Airless Spaces is a subtle and deeply literary work. Embedded as a participant-observer, Firestone moves beyond the spectacular and frightening surfaces of institutional life to record individual lives and acts of cruelty and kindness. The existence that she depicts is a microcosm of the world beyond. What People Are Saying "One way to think of Firestone’s decline is to see her as an anti-feminist cautionary tale, an object lesson in how feminist politics can estrange a woman from society and render her incapable of functioning within it. But another way to read the story of Firestone’s life is equally disquieting: it raises the question of whether there is any difference between madness and being the only sane person in a sick world." Moira Donegan, The New Yorker"Airless Spaces is a remarkable book, the work of an artist who had continued to analyze and critique the conditions in which she was surviving, to observe in and around them larger struggles and injustices." Lidija Haas, Bookforum"A woman gifted with a significant intellect and an urgent need to right a historic wrong loses the ability to ground herself in everyday rationality—and writes a book that captures the situation so graphically it elevates her condition to the status of metaphor. The Dialectic of Sex is a polemic. Airless Spaces is literature." Vivian Gornick, Boston Review Show more