Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I’m Worthless, Cipher
Press, 2021
A dark, unflinching haunted house novel that takes readers from the well of the literary gothic, up through Brighton’s queer scene, and out into the heart of modern day trans experience in the UK.
The House spreads. Its arteries run throughout the country. Its lifeblood flows into Westminster, into Scotland Yard, into every village and every city. It flows into you, and into your mother. It keeps you alive. It makes you feel safe. Those same arteries tangle you up and night and make it hard for you to breathe. But come morning, you thank it for what it has done for you, and you sip from its golden cup, and kiss its perfect feet, and you know that all will be right in this godforsaken world as long as it is there to watch over you.
Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends Ila and Hannah. Since then, things have not been going well. Alice is living a haunted existence, selling videos of herself cleaning for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep. She hasn’t spoken to Ila since they went into the House. She hasn’t seen Hannah either.
Memories of that night torment her mind and her flesh, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, past the KEEP OUT sign, over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, she knows she must go.
Together Alice and Ila must face the horrifying occurrences that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, who the House has chosen to make its own.
Cutting, disruptive, and darkly funny, Tell Me I’m Worthless is a vital work of trans fiction that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors as it examines the devastating effects of trauma and the way fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other.
"Punk in every sense of the word, this is a debut unlike anything you’ve read before. Tell Me I’m Worthless builds a thoroughly British haunted house, and terrorises its readers inside; Rumfitt’s horrifying talent shrieks out from every page and rings in your ears for days." - Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts
“A sharp and visceral novel which bends the horror genre to its will. Tell Me I’m Worthless holds a gruesome mirror up to the way it feels to live now. I absolutely tore through this book” – Julia Armfield, author of Salt Slow and Our Wives Under the Sea
‘Ghosts are born from trauma and violence.’
I relish the rare moments when a book can completely annihilate you. Tell Me I’m Worthless, the debut novel by promising young writer Alison Rumfitt, is a horror novel that not only has teeth but an intelligence and power to tear you to pieces and put you back together in a way that leaves you forever haunted, and glad for it. Seriously, this book is intense and while the content warning that precedes her grisly tale lets you know what you are in for, nothing can truly prepare you for how unsettling this is in the way it forces you to confront the violent and pervasive ideologies of fascism as it slimes its way through modern society. Drawing on a long history of horror and fairy tale literature, Rumfitt delivers a razor-sharp and very political haunted house narrative that explores issues of trauma and the trans experience under creeping fascism. The novel rotates between perspectives of Alice, a trans woman, and Ila (with an intentional choice to mirror their names), her former girlfriend that is now a public figure for trans exclusionary radical feminists, and the voice of the House itself, as the two women deal with the aftermath of them having entered the house years ago with their friend Hannah. Only the two of them walked out, both with conflicting memories of abuse from the other that occurred during their stay, and are forever traumatized and haunted by both figurative and literal ghosts. Tell Me I’m Worthless is an unrelenting horror festival that boldly pulls the reader through the hell of modern discourse and violent ideologies to explore the real-life horrors of queer life in the UK.
‘Where were you when we lost the culture war?’
This book is a lot, and I’m completely blown away by it. Alison Rumfitt, a trans woman, has delivered a harrowing narrative on the trans experience that hits with a truly astonishing force and is a perfect example why we need inclusivity in publishing to tell a more encompassing range of stories. While Tell Me I’m Worthless draws on horror and fairy tale fiction influences complete with homages to Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Helen Oyeyemi, books including Jamaica Inn or Jane Eyre, as well as allusions to pioneers of literature on gender and race such as Audre Lorde, there is still a thrilling uniqueness to the novel that feels it couldn’t—and maybe shouldn’t—have been created by anyone but Rumfitt herself. The inspirations and occasional pastiche that occur are very welcomed, and Rumfitt has a reading list that I simply adore (it helps that with each reference I caught I thought, “I love that book too!”). The Haunting of Hill House is a clear inspiration and model for much of the book, and lovingly so. Look at one of Rumfitt’s descriptions of the House:
’ No live organism can continue to exist compassionately under conditions of absolute fascism, even the birds in Italy under Mussolini were observed to take part in rallies and violence. Albion, not compassionate, not sane, stood ringed by a tangled forest, holding inside, however messily, its overpowering ideology; it had stood so for a hundred years but would only stand for one more before it entered into the long process of becoming something else, at the end of which it was hoped it would seem to all the world that it had always been that way. Within, floors crumbled, ceilings gaped open, vines choked the chimneys and the windows. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of the house, and whatever walked there marched on Rome.’
It is a wonderful reimagining of the imagery and ideas expressed by Jackson and her notable opening paragraph to Hill House:
‘ No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.’
It feels less like a clever remake and more like passing the torch, continuing the tradition of psychological horror to battle the demons of the present with the support of those who came before. The whole book reads as very personal to Rumfitt and of-the-moment in a way that truly shines, with Rumfitt admitting it is build from a space of being ‘quite tuned into discourse, in a way that can be bad for my own health,’ and, written during the pandemic lockdowns, was constantly informed and updated to address the ever changing arguments that flood social media with each news cycle. It is effective and the language of the novel crackles in the tongue of modern internet discourse, twisted and imperfect as hot takes and viral twitter threads and soiled with the rhetorical maggots that lay their eggs and thrive in the damp and dark of 4chan anonymity. Tell Me I’m Worthless feels destined to become a cult classic as it truly captures uneasy existence as violent ideologies are given space and taken seriously in the general public while violence against trans people is so prevalent it has been declared an epidemic Or, perhaps, in ten years we may look back on it as outdated and not in line with a more inclusive present. This would be preferable, and the book argues for a future such as this.
‘The fascists are already here…’
As stated in the content warning, Tell Me I’m Worthless focuses on ‘trauma and fascism.’ This book is triggering in very many ways, dealing with sexual assault, transphobia, antisemitism, and racism among others, and it should be kept in mind they are used for more than mere discomfort for the horror genre and to make a very loud statement against them. Be warned though, this book is intensely graphic and uses a lot of language and explanation of ideas that are extremely uncomfortable (though very effective). Nothing is very subtle here either, with the house being very obviously a metaphor for how fascism can infect through entry points of fear, feelings of inadequacy, thirsts for power and more. However, there is no need for subtleties here, with bold choices such as the house being named Albion (a word that is used to name the island of Great Britain) and the directness of the book gives it a rather punk flair that works particularly well with the horror aesthetics. While Rumfitt avoids directly naming him, one of the ghosts that haunts Alice is the musician Morrissey—who’s political statements of late have more or less made him the older generation’s J.K. Rowling but for music—who appears eyeless out of her torn The Smiths poster she keeps up to cover a frightening looking stain on her wall. The effect is both comical and utterly terrifying to read, with Rumfitt being astonishingly good at creating very visual scenes full of terror, and this combination of horror and dark humor really drives the enjoyment of this book. This book is punk as fuck, as the saying goes.
This book is set in our present, where LGBTQ+ issues have gained visibility but also continue to have a frightening and often violent backlash. ‘Notable reversals have appeared in nations overtaken by right-wing populism,’ Jules Joanne Gleeson writes in an introduction to a collection of essays on the intersections of politics and trans culture, and in her interview for the Guardian between her and gender-studies philosopher Judith Butler, Butler (most notably in an answer that was removed hours after initial publication despite pushback from Gleeson) notes the large overlap between trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and neo-fascism, claiming an anti-trans ‘ ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times.’ The TERF ideology is prevalent through the novel, as Ila is an active member of an anti-trans organization and frequent contributor of essays and interviews on the subject. These passages may be difficult to read and much of the book makes the reader confront the rhetoric of anti-trans arguments. In an interview with Pink News (highly recommended read), Rumfitt explains that the narration from Ila was written for ‘ getting into the headspace of someone who, if they met me on the street, would probably hate me… it’s so much a part of modern discourse in this country that it’s kind of strange that it’s gone so unexplored.’ As she is someone who has undoubtedly heard these arguments far too often and made to feel unsafe because of them, Rumfitt delivers a very disturbing exploration.
‘ Now, if three girls enter a house and only two leave, who is to blame? And if both girls tell a different story, but you read online that you have to BELIEVE WOMEN, what do you? Do you decide one is a woman and one isn't, so you can believe one them but not the other? Do you take the side of the woman who is most like you? Or the most intersectional one? But one is rich, and white, and trans, and the other is rich, and Asian and a lesbian, and cis (?), and fuck, who wins here? In the end it's so hard to choose where your sympathies settle. So, you go online and find an `intersectionality score calculator' on the internet…Numbers have been known to lie. Numbers have been known to show bias, statistics often have racist undertones, for example.
So, there's just two girls leaving a house and maybe you don't have to take a side, maybe you can empathize with them both and hope they get the therapy and help they need and can learn to forgive one another. No. You can't do that.'
What makes Tell Me I’m Worthless so effective is how well it captures the nuance of modern discourse that is often swept aside out of inconvenience to get the best hot take. The nature of social media also positions people against each other, where the best spicy quip is often more valued than discourse. We exist in a world where access to information and theory is right at our fingertips, but there is still the difficulty in navigating and rationalizing it all. Activist Emma Dabiri discusses the difference between information and knowledge in this regard, and how the latter requires much more experience and cerebral undertakings to effectively utilize. Which is also Rumfitt’s point in presenting some of the more toxic ideologies and then framing them in complex and intricate scenarios almost as a test to see if you will succumb to the voice of the House as so many others do. The book borrows language and imagery from fascist political figures like Pinochet and Mussolini, or drawing from fear-mongering speeches like the ”rivers of blood” speech by Enoch Powell to demonstrate how persuasive they can be, particularly under extreme circumstances or while bathed in fear. While the growing fascism examined in the book is particularly framed as it occurs in the UK, the darkness of it is universal to anyone who has encountered far-right authoritarians in their many forms.
‘You, too, are implicated in its presence. Don’t forget that. You, me. Those you love.’
The House itself is written as a root of these ideas, spreading them throughout the land as well as claiming victims for itself in a way that feels like a more subtle version of the monster that infects the citizens of New York City with racism in The City We Became by the wonderful N.K. Jemisin. The House reminds us of our complicity in the society we exist within and that our systems and structures can be rotted at the core, creating a systemic violence or oppression that thrives on our denial of them. The effect here is that while people might not be knowingly fascist, it shows how they become willing to accept fascist rhetoric and arguments into their minds, which then festers and grows within them like vines slowly strangling out their empathy and humanity.
’The House spreads. Its arteries run throughout the country. Its lifeblood flows into Westminster, into Scotland Yard, into every village and every city. It flows into you, and into your mother. It keeps you alive. It makes you feel safe.’
Presenting this topic through the genre of horror is brilliant, keeping fear and safety a central topic in the novel. ‘For someone to feel safe, another has to be safe,’ the House preaches, ‘for someone, the majority, to prosper, another has to… well. I think you understand…’ The book places the characters in that unsettled, deflated feeling of being post-college and wallowing while waiting to land somewhere, making them all the more susceptible in their unease, and we watch as they are losing a battle of becoming a product of their traumas rather than one they wish to be. Only by returning to the House and confronting them can they ever move forward in life. In the present, Hannah is absent, the friend who ‘always ended being the odd one out, the third wheel,’ which made her the perfect victim for the House where she may or may not be either trapped inside or have fallen victim to the horrors she endured.
‘We were young and idealistic,’ they think of when they braved the House the first time, ‘ we wanted to make some political point of the whole thing.’ The political is always present in this book, but beyond topics of gender Tell Me I’m Worthless also tackles social class head on. Immigration, Brexit, crime, and more are all public conversation, one political ideologues capitalize on for power and profit, and the House is a well-constructed metaphor of these. ‘The most famous haunted places in the world tend to be the big houses and castles,’ Rumfitt writes, ‘because rich people lived in them and the collective blood on their hands, the collective violence that they caused on everyone else in the world, manifests into ghosts.’ Albion, the House and the nation, are examined as the product of years and years of bloodshed, colonialism, racial oppression, patriarchy and more amalgamating into a dark force that transcends the physical world. The reaches of the House occur in every corner of society, even property ownership that leads to pushing out the unhoused and anyone deemed an Other. An effective image occurs early in the book of an abandoned church with ‘a sign outside reading TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. God’s body, decaying, has now been cut off from society; do not touch him, for he is owned by a variety of contractors, and they have legal power over the likes of you.’
Tell Me I’m Worthless is an unflinching and brutally direct novel that combines horror with political and social discourse to deliver a fantastically unsettling story. Alison Rumfitt has taken the reigns from her predecessors and driven the genre of horror and fairy tales deep into the heart of our modern condition, constructing amazing imagery that thrills as much as it chills. Rumfitt has crafted a stunning debut here. This is certainly not for everyone, and I will caution that this book can be quite triggering, but if you dare to enter this book will have its ghosts following you forevermore.
‘Sometimes, at the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.’ - s. penkevich
Okay, wow. If you read Tell Me I’m Worthless, prepare to be haunted: for days after finishing it I was infected with its story, sick with it, couldn’t stop thinking about it. There are so many moments, observations and images from this book that have crawled inside and made themselves at home under my skin.
Three years ago, three girls – Alice, Ila and Hannah – entered the House, a corrupted, haunted place. Hannah never came out, and in the aftermath, Alice and Ila’s relationship is radically transformed. Once best friends and lovers, they now barely speak and have somehow come to occupy opposing ideological standpoints. A bit later, we find out that each of them believe the other to be guilty of violent and degrading assault, though it seems they can’t both be right. The only way out of it all is for Alice and Ila to return the House, and however horrifying that idea is, they are inexorably drawn back.
Sometimes, at the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.
Tell Me I’m Worthless is something entirely new. It’s a haunted house story unlike any other, and it’s also about fascism and trauma and guilt and gender and what it’s like to try and perform an acceptable impression of a functioning human being after bad shit has happened to you. It’s electrifying. It’s disgusting. It’s hot. It actually made me fucking THINK. It’s the best book about what it is to be a woman (specifically in modern Britain) that I’ve read in years, possibly ever. It’s the most radical horror novel of the year and probably the decade.
People who spend a lot of time talking about books, including me, are probably guilty of saying something is ~like nothing else I’ve ever read~ far too often, but that truly applies here. The only thing I can think of that I’d perhaps stand it next to is Gary Budden’s London Incognita, which has a similar punk spirit flowing through its veins, but the fact that Tell Me I’m Worthless is written specifically from a queer/trans/female perspective makes it feel that much more radical.
I might write more when I reread it – which I definitely will. Honestly, I’ve struggled to find the language to describe how good it is and how it made me feel; it’s an experience. Just know that if you are at all interested in horror, this book is essential reading. - Blair
more reviews at goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57307172-tell-me-i-m-worthless
Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt is, in many ways, a straightforward horror novel: on the surface, it’s a gruesome haunted house story about three friends whose lives are torn apart by a mysterious presence.
But Tell Me I’m Worthless is so much more than that. Rumfitt’s deeply unsettling story also explores the wave of transphobia that has been engulfing Britain for years, delving into the rise of fascism, Britain’s terrifying lurch to the right and the scourge of racism.
At the centre of the novel is the complicated relationship between Alice, a young trans woman, and Ila, a “gender critical” feminist who has become embroiled within the UK’s anti-trans movement.
“I’m interested in radicalisation and the effects of right wing politics, so I think it made sense that something as obviously conservative as a haunted house – a house that is maintaining the past so much that it is literally breaking the foundations of life and death – it made sense to me that that could be an effective framework for exploring right-wing politics,” Rumfitt says.
PinkNews: Why is the horror genre a suitable place to tackle issues like fascism and transphobia?
Alison Rumfitt: The really basic answer is: these things are horrible. It just makes sense to me – I don’t have to push things too much further to make them into actual, all-out horror. I find it scary so I wanted to write a novel where those things were scary to the general reader.
This is a novel, certainly first and foremost, I was writing for trans audiences. But I would hope that it’s also scary and interesting and enlightening to people who aren’t trans. That’s just the way I work – I try to prioritise our audience. There are particular interests in specific corners of horror within trans communities – we have particular interest in body horror. This is a book where things happen to people’s bodies that they can’t control that are quite upsetting.
I’ve always read into a lot of horrific things that I like, even if they don’t have subtext. I’ve always read into The Shining film and thought, that’s about racism, or I can look at The Exorcist and think, this is about some TERF parents whose child is showing signs of gender dysphoria and they’re freaking out and calling the Catholic police or whatever. So I was just trying to do that and make that stuff textual rather than me projecting subtext onto it.
The haunted house in Tell Me I’m Worthless is almost like a character of its own. What references did you look to in creating the house?
I’m a writer who writes a lot in references and intertextuality but hopefully that still works if you don’t know the references. Hill House is sort of, I think, the most perfect haunted house in literature. It’s so vivid and the characters in that novel are so vivid as well, so that was a big reference point. There’s a book called White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi – that has wonderful sections written from the perspective of this house. I had that in mind but I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t just doing what Helen did because I think she writes in a really unique way.
There are parts from the perspective of the house, but they’re not first person narration. I’m not sure I would have liked to write it that way because of what the house represents. I wanted to keep a distance. There are obviously references to speeches by fascists, there’s references to Oswald Mosley (the former leader of the British Union of Fascists), and the “rivers of blood” speech by Enoch Powell. So it does speak in those ways, but if there were sections just from its point of view that would have been too much.
The house is called Albion, which is an old name for Britain. What was the meaning behind that?
This was in my head because one of the last big things I did before lockdown was I went to a William Blake exhibition in London, and Albion is such a recurring character and concept within William Blake’s writing. I love William Blake, he’s a really interesting artist and writer to use to think about England and the changing perspectives of what England is. I think by using the name I was trying to imply a lot of history, going as far back as it’s possible to go into the roots of the country. The real horror is that the rot goes all the way down to the roots.
That really hit me reading it, the idea that this rot in Britain is by no means something new.
Because of the nature of how messed up the UK is, things would just be constantly developing as I was writing it, so I’d finish a draft and then suddenly there were the horrible right-wing arguments about Black Lives Matter protesters trying to censor statues, and then there were prosecutions against people involved in that. So when I did another draft I had to have that in mind, and once I finished that, more stuff happened – it kept happening! So it developed naturally because every time I would look online there would be something else.
The novel deals brilliantly with the idea of Britain today being a bit of a cesspit – how did you weave themes transphobia through?
Originally I wasn’t going to write so explicitly about gender criticals because I’d just put out this long poem about gender criticals and gender essentialism, and honestly, I wasn’t sure if me writing about it was doing any good. And then suddenly I realised that one of the primary characters of the novel needed to be – for want of a phrase that wouldn’t get me attacked – a TERF.
It was interesting to write a TERF character because I haven’t really read any books that have TERF characters, especially not books by trans people. And it’s so much a part of modern discourse in this country that it’s kind of strange that it’s gone so unexplored.
Ila is such an interesting, flawed character – the reader almost roots for her at times. What was it like for you exploring her psyche?
The thing I enjoyed was getting into the headspace of someone who, if they met me on the street, would probably hate me. I was trying to build a psyche of someone like that and work out if there was a way that I could still empathise with them. It’s kind of telling that Ila doesn’t ever quite feel like she is with the gender critical movement all the way. I don’t know if I could have written an unrepentant TERF with no point of origin of their bigotry. It was an experiment but it was an experiment I really relished.
The book also comes with a content warning, which was really refreshing. What was the reasoning behind putting that in there?
My general opinion is that authors should certainly consider including content warnings if they’re dealing with subjects that might be upsetting. But I really don’t want them to be mandated in any way – it should be up to the author. It’s a good idea if the author writes it out if they want it, rather than it coming from the publishing house.
I put it there honestly as much for me as for the reader. Work that deals with complicated and triggering subjects by marginalised creators is often the work that gets criticised more – I don’t know why that is. But I wanted to avoid off the bat accusations of writing trauma porn. I see a lot of queer writers get accusations of that thrown at them. It might still happen, but this was a way I could see to avoid that.
The book doesn’t have a very optimistic outlook for the future of Britain. Where do you think the country is headed?
My next novel is about that, so I can’t say too much. But I imagine it’s sort of clear. I don’t have an optimistic outlook. I don’t mean to be a doomer or anything like that, but the Overton window [the window of current political possibilities] doesn’t at all include left-wing ideas. I think it’s shifting even more and it’s narrowing even more. A lot of people who are in positions of power who could maybe do something about that are not doing it for whatever reason – maybe they see financial gain from it, maybe they see social gain from it, or maybe they just don’t really care about the people affected.
I don’t have a great outlook but the sliver of hope, if there is one, is seeing the renewed vigour around protest. We haven’t quite gotten to the point where it lasts for an extended period of time, but there certainly is still passion there.
Tell Me I’m Worthless also explores issues around social media, particularly with Twitter. Does it echo your own views of social media?
People have lots of different experiences of the internet. My experience is very much informed by being a trans woman online, a trans woman on Twitter especially. I don’t have a great view of Twitter – I go in for it, too. It’s a very easy place to end up in these death spirals of utterly pointless arguments.
Hopefully the tweets that are in the novel feel like real tweets and you can imagine coming across them on your timeline. There’s a bit where someone calls out a character for using the ’T’ slur on them, but they write out the word or they put an asterisks in it, and someone else tries to call them out for using that word as well, and it was just a really fun Russian doll of discourse.
Twitter isn’t the only website in the book – there are also sequences talking about 4Chan and Tumblr and Mumsnet. The Mumsnet stuff was really fun to write. Obviously it’s horrible, but there’s something about the twee, middle-class white woman phrasing they use on there that’s just hilariously slimy. Different websites have different languages so it’s fun to try and reproduce those languages. - PATRICK KELLEHER
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/10/29/alison-rumfitt-tell-me-im-worthless/
Alice, the protagonist of Alison Rumfitt’s debut novel Tell Me I’m Worthless, is haunted by a curious phantom. Every night, the disgraced frontman of a 1980s indie band (unnamed but unmistakable) crawls out from the poster which confines him and stands over Alice’s bed, his eyes blacked out with biro and radiating malevolent intent. If the idea of someone being haunted by an evil Morrissey poster sounds funny, that’s because it’s intended to be – but as the novel progresses, it becomes genuinely creepy, too.
It’s a satire that’s actually funny and a horror novel that’s actually scary. To blend genre without one aspect diminishing the other is a difficult feat to pull off, and made more impressive by the fact that, after beginning her career as a poet, this is Rumfitt’s debut novel.
Tell Me I’m Worthless concerns the wreckage of a friendship between two characters – Alice and Ila – both of whom are hateful at times but ultimately redeemable. Alice is a trans woman who scrapes a living through online sex work and drifts through Brighton’s house party scene. As a first-person narrator, she is bitter and acerbic, prone to erudite digressions on the nature of fascism and the conventions of the ghost story genre. Ila, meanwhile, has become a committed ‘gender critical’ activist: she attends meetings, appears on Radio 4 to discuss the importance of single-sex spaces, and boasts a number of anti-trans celebrities as followers on Twitter. The sections of the book which concern Ila’s journey through the world of anti-trans activism make for a lacerating, sharply-observed satire.
But this is, above all, a horror novel, and a haunted house looms large. Three years before the story begins, Alice and Illa (along with their friend Hannah, now missing) spent an evening in a decrepit mansion on the outskirts of the city, where they experienced a brutally violent incident. The house functions as a metaphor for a particularly English form of fascism, and exerts a Mephistophelian influence on the characters; it whispers in their ears, appealing to their worst impulses and most reactionary anxieties, doing everything in its power to lure them to return. When it eventually succeeds, the novel reaches an explosive climax.
There have been some excellent non-fiction books published about the trans experience recently: for instance, The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye and Transgender Marxism, edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke. Tell Me I’m Worthless refracts similar themes, but through the lens of horror and pitch-black comedy. It’s an at times transgressive, hallucinatory, and frenetic novel, but one which is nonetheless lucid in its treatment of its themes: the resurgent threat of fascism, the absurdities inherent to contemporary transphobia, and the way that trauma, rather than being a learning opportunity, can make people twisted and cruel. I caught up with Rumfitt to find out more about the novel.
Why did you decide to have Morrissey as one of the spectral presences in the book?
It honestly just started as a joke. I had a friend a couple years ago who had a Smiths poster on the wall of his room, and it always weirded me out that it was there, but I never really brought it up. When it came to writing the book, I was trying to think of something that could tell you a lot about the blind spots in someone’s politics, and ways to signal, fairly early on, that Alice isn’t someone that the audience should be trusting. It’s less that she’s clueless about what the poster says about her and more that she doesn’t care, and hopefully, that signals to the reader that while they might sympathise with this person, they shouldn’t go with her all the way.
There’s a tendency today for people to interpret characters in novels as direct stand-ins for the author (take the transphobic backlash to Detransition, Baby, for example, where lines of dialogue from Reese, the fictional character, were frequently attributed to Torrey Peters, the author). Are you concerned about being misinterpreted in that way?
There are bits in the novel where, if you took them out of context, would make me look bad. There’s one section where that is a very real danger. But I think that the formatting hopefully means that it can’t be taken out of context. I would hope that it’s pretty clear, if you read the novel, that my perspective is that Alice is wrong and has some abhorrent views.
It seemed to me that the book is partly about why fascism is seductive to some people. If fascism does have an appeal, what do you think the nature of that appeal is?
There’s one example I actually included in the book: I was at some university event with a group of left-people and there was a Trotskyist guy there arguing that the 2011 London riots were innately bad. It made me angry because it was such an annoying view for a left-wing person to have, and such a specifically white view – not understanding why that unrest was happening at all and purely foregrounding community order over understandable retaliation.
I think that’s a good example of how someone who would never think of themselves as right-wing could end up falling into right-wing viewpoints. You have to be vigilant of your own politics and where they’re being pulled from and what are the logical conclusions of your own ideology. I think white people, in particular, have a real potential for falling into right-wing thought without even thinking about it. - James Greig read more here: https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/alison-rumfitt-on-her-darkly-comic-tale-about-transphobia/
More reviews:
https://tornightfire.com/announcing-tell-me-im-worthless-a-new-novel-from-alison-rumfitt/
https://www.theskinny.co.uk/books/features/alison-rumfitt-interview-tell-me-im-worthless
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