Review by Mike Robbins
Unnamed Press / September, 2020 / 288 pp
Like a Bird, a coming-of-age story written with rare style and grace, follows Taylia Chatterjee from her dismal childhood into her young-adult years, when she must confront the challenges of her past or face the increasing complications of her spiraling depression. The stakes couldn’t be more emotionally complex, as Taylia addresses the psychic wounds of childhood, the pain of her sister’s untimely death, and the traumatic aftermath of a gang rape, all while living in post-9/11 New York as a dark-skinned, multiracial female. The result is a novel that fluidly navigates intersections of oppression, the cascading effects of isolation and loneliness, and the potential for new experience and friendship to offer insights and guidance. If you are a survivor, or someone who wants to understand the power of forgiveness, Like a Bird is for you.
Taylia, the youngest daughter of a first-generation Indian-American father and an Ivy League-educated Jewish mother, grew up in a building “with perfectly aligned alabaster columns that stood like ivory trunks… a beaming Taj Mahal on the Upper West Side” of New York. However, despite her parents’ education and wealth (both are tenured professors at Columbia), Taylia’s childhood is marred by a number of callously inflicted wounds. The most hurtful is her parents’ open preference for Taylia’s older, whiter, and skinnier sister:
Alyssa was beautiful in a way I’d never been, fair skinned and rapturous, the way that girls you can’t place are normally exotified. The light-eyed/light-skinned cocktail. I was darker skinned and darker eyed, which made all the difference. Baba would talk about Alyssa like a specimen of grand genetics— “An almost Kashmiri!” he’d say, slightly proud. A rare compliment from a Hindu Indian, and the absence of one directed at me hit like a flood.
Though Taylia may be invisible to her father, she remains highly visible to her mother, who observes her “body with a glaring awareness that pivoted to perpetual critique. As if all I needed to do was embrace x, y, and z—and I would be beautiful. ‘Just lose a bit of the baby fat,’ or ‘Don’t walk so heavily on the stairs,’ or ‘Eat less at night.’” With parents like Taylia’s, it’s no wonder she turns inward for solace, treating her “ability to hide and remain unseen like a sport.”
While Taylia’s childhood experiences plant the seed for her often-debilitating shyness and insecurity throughout the book, her parents’ uncaring response to an assault Taylia suffers on the second anniversary of Alyssa’s death bursts that seed into a terrible flower. After Simon—Alyssa’s ex-lover and the son of their father’s closest friend—invites Taylia out on a date, he drugs her drink. She wakes up in an unknown room while Simon and two other boys violate her. The act is heinous, leaving Taylia with the belief that nothing else could possibly be taken from her. Unbeknownst to Taylia, Simon has preemptively provided her parents with a false version of events, asserting that she became drunk and overtly sexual with him and his friends the evening before. When Taylia’s parents confront her, they don’t wait to hear her side of the story. Instead, they kick her out of the house for being a “slut.”
Not knowing where she might end up, Taylia leaves home with just a pair of headphones and a Jansport backpack. For a week, Taylia wanders the city and grieves, finding solace in speaking with the apparition of her deceased grandmother. Taylia continues to speak with ghosts, of her grandmother as well as Alyssa, throughout the novel during moments of intense stress.
Eventually, refusing to succumb to her situation, Taylia inquires about a job at a bakery. The owner, Kat, agrees and, not long after, offers her a place to live. Over time, Kat becomes a safe and trustworthy friend who teaches Taylia how to heal through vulnerability. Kat, along with a rotating cast of new and old characters, provides the friendship and love Taylia needs to build a life of her own. Ultimately, she concludes:
I thought that living and existing were the same thing. Two plus two equals life. But as you grow older, or wiser, or maybe both, you start noticing the nuances between living and existing. I thought that once I met someone like Ky—a man to save me from myself—my life would have meaning. Pure, striking, pulsating meaning. I’d have purpose. Better yet, I’d be exempt from suffering, from my all-encompassing, boring pain. I was naive to think that being happy meant the absence of misery, because, well, it doesn’t.
Up until this point, pain and misery constitute the central obstacles of Taylia’s life in Like a Bird. But here, Róisín transforms the novel from one woman’s story into a universal lesson for the reader. Happiness, Róisín says through Taylia, requires honesty, as well as refusing to accept constant emotional pain, no matter the source.
Like a Bird is a bit of a literary Rorschach test. The book’s style and unconventional structure favor complexity over streamlined characterization and plotting. It reminded me of a quote from Carol Bly’s The Passionate, Accurate Story: “I want social change more than I want literature with unbroken skin around it.” Róisín seems to want this too, as her book flies in the face of most workshop advice—show characters in action rather than telling what they experienced, shorten dialogue so it doesn’t feel like transcription, and avoid references to people or places that might break the reader’s imaginative bubble. Instead, in the first twenty pages, Taylia references The Sopranos, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Blockbuster Video, and the lyrics of “That’s Amore,” all of which endow the story with a hyper-realistic sheen that made me think of photorealism in painting (Chuck Close, for instance). Róisín’s novel so blurs boundaries that it often felt more like memoir than fiction. This is a good thing.
Like a Bird’s style challenges common conceptions about what a novel is and should be and constitutes the central artistic priority of Róisín’s work. Should she as passionately and accurately as possible depict the damaging shyness of a child who’s been psychologically abused, encapsulate the social wariness of someone who’s experienced sexism, racism, body shaming, and all the rest, while also cataloguing hyper-sensitivity to detail and paranoia that so commonly afflicts the minds of trauma survivors? Or should she, in her capacity as a novelist, simplify Taylia’s character, make her life less complicated, tweak her oppressions until they’re more palatable, and combine her sister and grandmother into one character, all so the reader can focus less on realistic dilemmas and more on plot? I think the latter is what most MFA courses would suggest. As someone who’s tried to write about trauma within a large family, I can only imagine how many times Róisín must have been advised to simplify, simplify, simplify. I am glad she did not. Complexity is part of the point.
Every trauma survivor must become an autodidact of their own pain. By telling Taylia’s whole truth in Like a Bird, rather than flattening her into a more marketable heroine, Róisín locates Taylia’s experience within the body rather than as a response to the catalytic forces of plot. Róisín’s authorial instinct toward complexity increases, rather than undermines, the visceral impact of Taylia’s story, charting a path beyond Victorian realism and toward new fictional possibilities for social change.
Mike Robbins is a graduate of Iowa State’s Creative Writing and Environment program. He has received writers’ residencies from Art Farm in Nebraska and the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, where he is now Director of the Writers in Residence program.