Alternative Hollywood Ending by Heather Taylor-Johnson
“you must avoid salt though your body craves it, being so full of the ocean. You are a lost fish”
~ ‘Trying to Write About Ménière’s’
American-Australian author Heather Taylor-Johnson’s sixth collection of poetry, Alternative Hollywood Ending (Wakefield Press, 2022) navigates themes of chronic illness and speaks to her experience with the invisible illness of Ménière’s disease. Divided into four sections – ‘What we think of when we think of the earth,’ ‘Thump,’ ‘Sick-ass Love’ and ‘A Useful Body’ – the collection explores climate change and the environment, the domestic sphere, the political injustices of the Trump era, chronic illness and the body. With its strong political stance, sustained exploration of chronic illness and what it means to live with an invisible disability, Taylor-Johnson builds on her substantial body of work.
The poem ‘Trying to Write About Ménière’s’ – which forms part of the powerful section ‘Sick-ass Love’ – first featured in the anthology Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain (UWAP, 2017). This anthology, edited by Taylor-Johnson, presents poems and short essays from the lived experiences of twenty-eight writers. A short essay written by each of the poets accompanies their poems. Arising from a time when Taylor-Johnson was diagnosed with Ménière’s, she says she wanted the anthology to be about ongoing conditions, and those who lived with illness. ‘Trying to Write about Ménière’s’ is a prose poem with three numbered vignettes. The poem moves from the body in the first vignette with evocative lines like “you’re tired of backstroking in a circle when you close your eyes to the glaring sun”, to exploring silence and still wanting to write about “the sound in your left ear” in the second vignette. The third vignette is an extended metaphor of a dress as health and its changing cycle, along with the transformative lines: “Now you have a fishtail and are growing fins. You have no need of dresses because your scales would only snag the fabric.”
In her previous work, we can see how the environment, the domestic, love, illness and the body are continually returned to. Her first book Exit Wounds (Picaro Press, 2007) explored birth, death, passion and domestic moments in an intimate, conversational tone. Letters to my Lover from a Small Mountain Town (IP, 2012) and Thirsting for Lemonade (IP, 2013) navigate the familial, objects, home, the body and identity, while Meanwhile, the Oak (Five Islands Press, 2016), dives into nature, place, motherhood and the act of being a writer. Rhymes with Hyenas (Recent Work Press, 2021) is an inventive verse novel that experiments with reimagining women from history whose voices were previously taken by men. These women become present as an imagined writers’ group in Adelaide who wield poetry as email attachments and organic email threads, which are woven throughout. The women’s voices, sacrifices, sexualities, chronic illnesses and disabilities both sing and roar on the page. Alternative Hollywood Ending powerfully continues exploring these themes.
In an interview with Radio Adelaide, Taylor-Johnson says the concept of Alternative Hollywood Ending began with her need to write poems to challenge quotes from Trump that affected her. The title was drawn from a line in a poem that didn’t make it into the book but spoke to her imaginings of what the world would have been like to live in had Trump not been elected – a much better place. Taylor-Johnson’s written response to Trump is especially evident in the second section ‘Thump’ and her poem ‘Crime and Punishment 1866 and 2018’ which deftly plays with these different types of alternative endings through form and layout. For example, juxtaposing Dostoevsky’s protagonist Raskolnikov with Trump, the last lines of this poem reveal:
“a consumptive’s blood protestors’ bloodstains
in a yellowed hanky on the street
they imprisoned me in Siberia. I holiday at Mar-a-Lago.”
The first section ‘What we think of when we think of the earth,’ links the environment metaphorically to the experience of chronic pain and illness. For instance, in ‘On Puget Sound,’ Taylor-Johnson writes, “For now, water / the way it lays pain down on the blue horizon.” However, the physical effects of the environment, weather and climate change on Taylor-Johnson’s illness is also referred to in the purposefully disorientating poem ‘Barometric Pressure Changes’ from her section ‘Sick-Ass Love’:
“…if I try to tell
you about the wind one word swallows the next, I am gasping, it
was Wednesday my illness is back, I lost myself in a barking dog I
mean went down a tunnel, came back the moment I left…”
In her poem ‘The Weather,’ the effect of the wind becomes a force that threatens to unravel the narrator.
“5. The wind has severed limbs from trees, driven me mad for three
days. It might be the cause of all of this, sharp noise spinning me
out, the barometric pressure, the world devouring itself…”
‘Sick-ass Love’ gives insights into chronic illness through Taylor-Johnson's lived experience with deep specificity. For example, in ‘Mother Goes to Shops for Soccer Socks,’ she writes: “Where is the book of falling – not in love, not out of it / nor from grace – just down? The book that loses balance…” She then later leaves the reader with the revelation: “…& that’s the problem / I always seem to have when I’m feeling ok: one minute the reflection / in the glass is slick & honest & the next on an incline it bends.”
The final section of the collection ‘A Useful Body’ interrogates themes of the body, womanhood, assault and of having to look over one’s shoulder. In ‘Safety’ Taylor-Johnson writes:
“My daughter thinks safety’s a right, not an untethered thing over her
head forever trailing shadows. Her world is open, like air, and she
scoops it up by the lungful, so far from my own of glimpsing men
who get off at my stop on the last train home…”
Inevitably, Taylor-Johnson brings her collection back to love and the domestic, in ‘Always Everything’: “…and in the morning / let’s cook eggs. The world is still us.” The collection ends with this healing breath – a recipe for how to survive and live, despite it all.
Anna Jacobson is an award-winning writer and artist from Brisbane. Her book Amnesia Findings (UQP) won the 2018 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Anna’s second poetry collection, Anxious in a Sweet Store, is forthcoming with Upswell in 2023. Her website is www.annajacobson.com.au.