Disenchanted
Kaycie hall
Reviewed by Ethan Veenker
In J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Peter, who in this original version is much younger and more emotive than the one we know from Walt Disney, decides after several months spent away from his mother in the company of fairies and talking birds to return to his past and to be her baby boy once more. But when he finally he finds the right house, the window is shut and locked by iron bars. Beyond the glass his mother dozes happily with some other baby boy, a replacement, and though Peter cries and pounds upon the bars, she doesn’t hear a thing. “[T]here is no second chance, not for most of us,” Barrie’s narrator intones. “When we reach the window it is Lock-out Time. The iron bars are up for life.”
So, too, in Disenchanted, Kaycie Hall’s debut book of essays, do we find bars between a baby and his mother, and with them, a mild inversion: “Even though he’s the one behind the bars,” Hall tells us as she prepares to read a bedtime story, “it is I who am the captive.” These bars are those of the baby’s crib, of course. No magical children here, not in the literal sense. But still that longing, this time from the mother: an impotent grief for what might have been. For Hall, the bars went up many years ago—there is no going back.
“Enough people really haven’t been mean to you in your life,” observes an ex-boyfriend in the book’s final essay, “Best Wishes”. Though we encounter it after the other essays, this moment in Hall’s life is before the baby, before the life in New York and the year upstate, before the miscarriages, before lockdown, before the marriage and its end and before, in the very next paragraph, the same man solicits a blowjob. “I wanted him to feel cared about before I left,” Hall tells us, so she obliges.
It is this caring that undergirds so many of the book’s hardest moments. In “Imaginary,” Hall breaks it off with an abusive ex who had developed an addiction to heroin. Nevertheless, she visits him one last time “because he asked me to” and finds him, as she supposes in retrospect, glimpsing the void. “Please, can’t you just love me the way I am?” he begs, and because the essay is largely an accounting of her many attempts to do just that, we don’t even need to hear the answer. In the COVID-era piece “Miscarrying,” at an appointment she already knows will bring news of the worst, Hall takes the time to compliment the ultrasound technician’s bangs. Later, while relating what her doctor told her next, she reflects on the strangeness of having never seen the bottom half of the woman’s face but even so recalls her “beautiful big brown eyes.”
This is a trick she pulls again and again: the juxtaposition of an awful moment with some coy, recovered detail. Although the book is more than a catalogue of awful moments and misbehaving men, you won’t find any essays simply riffing on the good things in life. Trouble is always brewing. We see this in the essay “Home,” which recounts Hall’s year in upstate New York and her gradual disillusionment—disenchantment, even—with what she had hoped would be a restorative break from the city, and in “Amy,” an almost clinically told postmortem of a whirlwind friendship that strains and sputters beneath the yoke of incorrigible rivalry. It’s as if nothing beautiful can truly survive.
But then there’s the baby, that hard-won, longed-for object of love, a thing to make and be made by. And then there’s Hall herself, who, though reserved at times in the face of her misery, permits herself catharsis here and there: “I had survived domestic abuse, lost my mother at fifteen, moved around and travelled alone through this world as a woman. My father-in-law has never left South Brooklyn.” It’s almost a relief to come across these lines; one wants to stand and cheer. A charge of meekness wouldn’t stand against her, nor of a dearth of wisdom, but that’s not to say pain inherently makes you better. It doesn’t. It’s just another thing to learn from.
Peter Pan’s mother lost her baby, but she got a new one and barred the window so it couldn’t escape again. Kaycie Hall runs a similar calculus, though she reaches a different conclusion: “I feel the motherly impulse to safeguard him at all costs, which I can only do by locking him away from the world,” she explains, and though safety is good and kind, it is not always what we need, not always the finest way to love, “for in keeping him safe, I will have kept him from living.”