REVIEWS OF HIGH ON LIFE AND SPACEGIRL PUKES

 Diva, February 2007

Spacegirl Pukes is a colourful picture book for young children aged three to seven. The story concerns intergalactic adventuress Spacegirl and what happens when she falls ill. Adults may cringe at the amount of puke, but kids love it. Ella, aged five: ‘It’s very funny. It’s very gross and has lots of sick – even the cat’s sick. I like it because the little girl in the story has two mummies, like me.’

It’s long overdue: children growing up with lesbian parents need books which reflect their reality. Writer Katy Watson and illustrator Vanda Carter of Out For Our Children address the shortage of materials featuring LGBT families by producing their own. Onlywomen Press is planning to publish more.

Spacegirl is great entertainment and helps prompt discussion about lesbian and gay families.

4 stars

JW & EW

 Knjizevni listi, fortnightly literary supplement
of daily newspaper DELO, 7/7/03

A fresh image of woman’s solitude and love

Novel High on Life was published in Great Britain (April 2002). Just a year later we got the Slovenian translation by Suzana Tratnik. This is the first novel of Katy Watson, born in 1966, who was also a co-editor of lesbian-feminist newspapers Shocking Pink and Bad Attitude.

The title of the book, High on Life, is ambiguous. On one hand it paradoxically points out to the anti-drugs campaign catchword and on the other hand it hits the essence of the question why do people take drugs at all. The real fighting against drugs remains ridiculous and ineffective with the use of paper war, moralizing and other strategies which flourish especially in Western countries (such as Nancy Reagan’s slogan Just say no to drugs). Slogan high on life is a product of similar thinking as though all of us should be able to enjoy our life without being stoned.

Novel has a distinctive feminist note, it’s a book about drugs, addiction, love, human relationships. With its sensitiveness to social theme written from the woman’s perspective, it perhaps comes near to the known novel We, Children from the Bahnhof ZOO (Germany, 1981), the story about addiction of a teenager Christiane F.

The main character of the novel is Esther, alluring and witty young woman, a graphic designer, emancipated, with a satisfying job and a flat in Brixton, with an attentive mother with whom she communicates mainly on phone. Above all, Esther was never doing what she was expected to and she was proud of it. The world changes when Irfan enters her life (they had fallen head first into love and there was no going back) and later also the heroin. And endless bohemic discussions on theme whether drugs are good or bad, after all it’s just a substance and the only thing that counts is what people do with it. And they would be careful. Just because the rest of the world demonised heroin, that didn’t mean they had to, too. The center topic of the novel is a question why Esther became addicted in the first place. The author Katy Watson constantly digs in this direction, searches the answers to crucial questions, and those answers are always different, always slippery. A lot of details is described according to author’s personal experience although we couldn’t see it as an autobiographical piece. Heroin addiction and kicking of, working on a feminist fanzine, working in a record shop, the rhythm of the streets in south London are described so authentically, genuine and freshly that it’s hard to imagine they were made up.

Esther was happy, she loved Irfan, they weren’t ready to give in to the suffocating corset of this world’s possibilities, the crushing two-sided vice of working class and middle class, of losers and tainted winners, in their heroin daze they were more and more closing themselves between four walls of their home. They believed there had to be another way. The crucial moment comes when Irfan suddenly walks away from Esther and she decides for gradual kicking the habit on her own. And right at this point, in chapters where she brutally realistically describes initial torments of healing (How long does it take before you become better? Has anyone else been through this before her?), about which she knew nothing, the author Watson is the strongest in her writing, she is sober, angry, and sometimes through Esther’s eyes full of contempt for everything. Sentences are short, the world is described cruelly, realistically, passionately, directly, with irony and a lot of intelligent humour. Dialogues, especially the ones with the representatives of the institutions, are juicy, smart, humorous and never cliches. There are some counsellors (Gudrun) who understand or at least try to understand, they are not all judgemental. Through the process of getting clean another traumatic point of the story is revealed, the point that was buried deep down in Esther’s unconsciousness, that something she never admitted to herself, let alone resolved it. This is sexual abuse in her childhood and a father figure in her life.

This novel is a sensible, modern, fresh, urban image of an intimate woman’s solitude and love, of horrible pain and inebriant, dark daze, a narration which in spite of horrifying content wittily points to numerous possibilities for survival after addiction. This path is not simple, not straight, but Watson never dramatises, never moralizes, she does not teach and does not violently intervene the story. In this catching and many times over subversive narration, everyone can recognize his or her own dark sides, everyday nightmares and solitariness.

Varja Velikonja

(quick translation: Suzana Tratnik)

 Uncut, August 2002

Brixton-based writer Katy Watson’s debut novel High on Life is a newcomer to the canon of heroin literature. It tracks likeable, screwed-up Esther as she goes from smack adoration – “She slowly drew the plunger back. Her blood in the barrel was scarlet and lovely” – to ugly addiction – “Her veins were shouting at her, crying out for the needle.” Between junkie hell in Brixton-Peckham-Camberwell and hopes for redemption come some very Uncut moments: “She thought endlessly about scoring. She listened to The Handsome Family’s tales of death and their yearning matched her own.” Or this: “She was listening to Elliott Smith obsessively... on ‘Angeles’ a ringing sound like a finger on the rim of a glass was the sound of pain itself.” High on Life is a powerful, disturbing novel, characterised by flurries of unbearable honesty and dirty realism.

4 stars

Nick Johnstone

 Big Issue In The North, 27/4/02

In the same way drunks think they are social stars, heroin addicts, according to Katy Watson, “know they are cool because they are doing the best thing a person can do, which is to take heroin.”

In this partly autobiographical first novel, Watson charts a young woman’s downward spiral into addiction.

Esther has a good job, is in a loving relationship and has no apparent reason to turn to drugs. What starts out as a weekend recreational activity turns to dependency and her life begins to crumble. The long haul back into normality is graphically described, as she drags herself through an inadequate health care system and the frightening zeal of Narcotics Anonymous.

Watson gives an honest account of the physical agony of ‘kicking’ and the mental anguish of facing up to some painful truths from the past. The blurb on the jacket describes it as “wildly funny” though I failed to see the joke.

3 stars

Diane Broughton

 The Scotsman, 20/4/02

Watson’s partly autobiographical heroin chic opus takes the grit of Trainspotting and transports it to a middle-class descent into the twin hells of addiction and trying to go straight – though there is a lot more of the latter than the former. Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation is the nearest comparison, but this is a novel as much about wrestling with inner demons as the demon drug itself. This creates a bit of a navel-gazing moral wrestling match at times, albeit also plenty of wryly self-deprecating insights, such as the fact that the favourite film of junkies is Trainspotting. This is no Trainspotting, but Watson has a good grasp on why good girls “choose drugs”.

3 stars

 The Times, 13/4/02

Down, but not out

Drug addiction, like depression, has been grist to many a writer's mill. The ups and downs of craving, scoring, coming up and coming down, provide a dramatic backdrop for the modern novel, as newer writers, such as Camilla Gibb and Nicholas Blincoe, as well as the established names of Will Self and Irvine Welsh, have proved.

But not all such books have been successful. Much of today's "drug-lit" is rambling, solipsistic and often derivative of the grand masters of Seventies psychedelia. However, Katy Watson's debut manages to avoid all these pitfalls and more. Her story revolves around Esther, a nice middle-class girl with a kind mummy, a gorgeous boyfriend and a rewarding job on a trendy women's magazine. But she finds there's something missing: a level of excitement that ordinary life cannot fulfil. What begins with an occasional sniff of the dealer's apron soon spirals out of control.

Watson charts the dizzying speed with which sexy fun becomes nightmarish horror with the understanding of one who has been there, combined with a technical ability unusual in a first-time novelist. Humour is never far from the surface, making the narrative a bittersweet, sensitive examination of being in thrall to a narcotic which, even at her worst moments, makes Esther feel "bohemian" and "different".

This is a big cut above the usual "my drugs hell" confessional: Elizabeth Wurtzel, look and learn.

Melissa Katsoulis

 The List , 11/4/02

Drugs drama

Any tale that highlights the perils of addiction ought to be applauded, simply for bringing it to the public eye. However, Katy Watson fails her subject matter. Our addict protagonist, Esther, is simply too convenient to be true (graphic layout artist, feminist, sexually abused as a child) and her smack problem looms on a predictable horizon, as does her eventual rehabilitation.

The empathy we are encouraged to feel is often smothered under untimely and contrived helpings of amateur political philosophy, the obligatory slagging of Trainspotting, and the odd anti-capitalist rant.

Too many channels of thought are touched upon, and High on Life could go in so many directions; sadly, most remain unexplored and the novel is left with a horribly unsatisfactory ending. Watson is keen to reassure us that her characters are not run of the mill addicts, but despite all their cute quirks and cross-dressing, it’s all too obvious that they come from the same template.

2 stars

Rowan Martin

 Big Issue , 8/4/02

Out this week

Katy Watson’s first novel eschews glorifying heroin chic in favour of a harshly realistic and often funny account of addiction. For its heroine, the frank and immensely likeable Esther, addiction coincides with the beginning of a passionate, three-sided relationship between herself, her boyfriend and smack. Esther’s attempts to move on from the initially alluring yet ultimately soul-destroying repetitiveness of the addict’s lifestyle are unsparingly drawn, and via Watson’s cleanly written, non-judgmental first-person narrative, the reality of addiction is portrayed without ever losing sight of Esther’s individuality.

TJ

 Coventry Evening Telegraph and Nuneaton
Evening Telegraph, 6/4/02

High-flier’s plunge into heroin depths

Esther and her boyfriend Irfan are bohemians. At least that’s what they think when they start taking heroin as a weekend pleasure from their hard work and left-wing political pastimes throughout the week.

They’re not stupid enough to get addicted – so how does it happen that weeks later they are taking the drug daily, unable to pay their bills and meeting a dealer has become the most important thing in their day?

When they lose their jobs and have to keep taking heroin to stop feeling desperately ill, something has to go. And that is Irfan, who leaves Esther alone with what she soon realises is her addiction.

Then the battle to give up and get back to “normal” life begins.

Esther is a very sympathetic character, who leaves the reader willing her to succeed, though she’s not even sure herself if she wants to.

Watson’s book is entirely unjudgmental, and depicts in amazing detail how an intelligent, educated person can sink into a filthy existence, seduced by the charms of an overwhelmingly attractive drug.

Julie Chamberlain

 Rainbow@Lycos Books, April 2002
www.lycos.co.uk/webguides/ents/gayandlesbian

Katy Watson's debut novel follows the progress of a young woman trying to break free of heroin addiction.

The cover name-checks Trainspotting, but this is more of a sister novel to Christiane F the lurid tale of a teenager's descent into addiction, published in 1981, rather than Welsh's 1995 bestseller.

Trainspotting handles drugs more subtly than High on Life, which covers well-worn clichés about the pleasures of heroin, the nightmare of addiction and the pain of cold turkey. At its worst points the prose is monotonous, particularly when fixated on the sickness incurred by heroin withdrawal. Sometimes the simplicity of the plot makes the novel read as though it is merely stale anti-drugs propaganda for teenagers, why, for example, does one of the characters die when many heroin addicts maintain habits for years?

Despite these criticisms, there are elements of High on Life which make it an accomplished book, and a fresh addition to the already bursting Smack-Lit genre, whose honorary members include William Burroughs, Jim Carroll and the aforementioned Welsh.

With some great attention to detail, a convincing depiction of drug use and vivid descriptions of south London, it is no surprise to find that parts of Watson's novel are based on her direct experience, although she doesn't go into details.

Heroin is the big momma drug that has fuelled some considerable mythology within popular culture and Watson has a real understanding of this. She shows in her novel that addicts do not live in a vacuum and demonstrates how music and films about heroin inform a user's lifestyle. In one memorable scene the protagonist and her friend offer their own commentary whilst they watch the film version of Trainspotting, retching when Ewan McGregor shoots up a mixture that looks disgusting to an authentic addict.

Watson also includes some nice pieces of historical detail. As a real life former member of the Shocking Pink and Bad Attitude collectives of the 1980s and 90s, she charts the depressing disintegration of these early feminist zines with an insider's eye.

But what is particularly good about High on Life is the way it offers no pat solutions. Recovery from addiction is not presented as a straightforward journey from point A to point B, and although Watson hints at the forces which encourage people to become addicts, she does so gently and refuses to hammer home her theories. Ultimately this makes High on Life an affecting and life-affirming walk on the wild side for those readers who like to partake without risk.

Rainbow Rating: 4 stars

Charlotte Cooper

 Blurb from Jill Dawson, author of Fred & Edie, 25/10/01

“Forget Trainspotting: if you've ever wondered what it's like to be in the thrall of heroin, read this. In High on Life we follow the fortunes of Esther, a painfully real protagonist, journeying with her through every agonising vacillation of her love affair with the drug. The world of heroin depicted in the novel has a ring of absolute authority and using humour, remarkable honesty and a complete lack of trendy posturing Katy Watson creates a novel which is occasionally a paean to heroin, but most of the time a salutary song of despair.”