By Simone Anders
Her mother judges, often and perhaps too harshly. She pretends not to, but her daughters know this side of her well. Her gentle, yet slightly ambivalent father reads feverishly, as he subtly pulls at his own hair in a quiet compulsion, allowing his fingers to feel, to sense, to pluck like an instrument, the tangled messiness of his salt-and-pepper curls. Soon, this is what she does as well.
It is small at first, but it doesn’t stop at a pluck, or a pull. It starts to become noticeable, so she hides herself away – in closets, toilets, and bedrooms. It becomes a sacred ritual, a locus of agency over her own body. Dumont notices that something is building within her sense of self, silently knowing that her secluded, personal rituals are becoming a problem; a slow-forming scar that will show itself in every aspect of her life.
The Pulling, Adele Dumont’s recent memoir on compulsive hair-pulling or ‘trichotillomania’, is a book filled with these little moments of recollection: it is a subtle experience. Dumont’s collection of narrative essays is not a mere recollection of her experiences; it is, in many ways, a biography of a family – their unexplained and inexplicable nauseas, neuroses and nitpicks. Each essay illuminates and splits into the next in a fluid narrative exploration of time.
Dumont details her entanglement of familial tics, the progression of her compulsive need to pull at her own hair, and its development into both disease and eventual diagnosis. She is fixated on understanding compulsion, dedication, and the subtle intricacies of human connection in light of over-arching narratives.
This, for me, makes her work more than an expositive memoir. It isn’t simply a personal diegesis of how self reflects the other and vice versa; it is both excavation and exploration of the self and its subsequent construction, about the myriad of ways the disease develops into interactions with the world that require a vivid sense of introspection.
Dumont’s prose is almost metered. She isn’t concerned about how sensational she can make the experience, nor is she interested in ‘othering’ her experiences as something distinct or outside the realm of normality. For her, describing her illness is another piece of her life, scattered amongst memory into the development of a highly misunderstood and socially isolating illness. Her journey is not one of high-end achievement, nor of entirely ‘beating’ her illness. It is part acceptance, and part reflection on how experience and illness form into a self, in sometimes barely comprehensible ways.
Dumont’s outlining of the practices regarding her illness transfixes the reader – her quiet measurements of strings of hair over toilet seats; her compulsive needs and how they interact with day to day life; her little practices building into mountains of stress; the anxiety she experiences as she tries to explain the nature of her disease to partners, to loved ones and to family members.
These portions of The Pulling are mechanistic, yet tangibly forceful in their writing. Again, she doesn’t simply list her afflictions, nor does she question her reactions to her illness in a way that abstracts it apart from herself. Like strands of hair, each chapter of The Pulling is carefully measured, compared to, and contrasted with the others. It is not quite a scientific journaling, nor is it a poetic explanation, but a book fascinated by the visceral components of those little aspects we either do not notice or do not wish to explain. It is about fissures, segments, and proportions.
I lost myself in this book, hands in hair, quietly, compulsively plucking amongst Dumont’s frank untangling of her life and those who inhabit it. Although it may seem quite up-front, even brutally so, The Pulling encourages a far more hopeful understanding of how we must disentangle these misunderstood illnesses from the distant realities of life and trace their aspects with a cautious, methodical eye.
The Pulling was first published by Scribe Publications in 2024 and has an RRP of $29.99. It is available from most online and local retailers.
See also a book and society blog on ‘The Pulling’ by Rohana Atkinson from GSP Book and Society blogs.
Simone is a trans, non-binary woman who lives and works in Naarm. She has written and produced for JOY 94.9, developed works for the stage, and has written for Overland, Mascara Literary Review, Beat, Archer, and more.
Cover image by GSP editor Finn Zucchi, used with permission.
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