Delicate Creatures
Kate Horowitz, The Sex Pistols and accessorising your poor mental health
Sad
One of the few (only?) nice things about being a writer on the internet is the opportunity it gives you to meet and converse with other writers far away who you never would otherwise have a chance to talk to. Kate Horowitz and I started as online fans of each other’s work 10-15 years ago and grew into close friends over time (she did a bottom shelf for this newsletter that can be found here). I have always been in awe of the almost sneaky way she slides emotional resonance and devastation into her work, from haiku to essay, it’s always there. A science writer by profession, Horowitz did a diptych of essays, one about bats and one about rabbits, which blended research on these animals with her own life. Bat Facts was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2023. Rabbit Facts, which came out December of last year, is an extraordinarily creative and courageous piece of writing which I wanted to highlight by asking her how she did it, building a bit on my last newsletter on writing about yourself. Horowitz provides insight below into constructing personally vulnerable work about trauma. TW Rabbit Facts is an essay about sexual assault by a family member.
The topic of this essay is both vulnerable and disturbing. How did you make the space for yourself to write it?
One of the best things I learned in Tara Hardy’s trauma writing workshop was to pace myself. Tara’s rule was that we couldn’t write about anything traumatic for more than 15 minutes at a time. We also had to check in with a buddy before and afterward. When I started writing Rabbit Facts a few years later, I stuck to the 15-minute rule, at least to start. I told myself I never had to do it for more than 15 minutes, or do it at all.
The other thing that helped was ritual.* As you know, I have a little witch figurine who acts as a kind of talisman or guardian. Each night before I started writing, I’d set her beside my laptop. I had a tiny writing treat of two cinnamon heart candies before I began and another two after. I listened to the same soothing nature sounds every night, and I’d often check in with at least one buddy before and/or after writing. All these comforting, consistent cues helped me feel grounded enough to wade in.
What made it possible for you to write and publish this? What support did you need?
Time, therapy, and friends.
Writing about trauma takes time, so much more time than other things. You’re not just writing; you’re reopening old wounds and cleaning out the rot and grit so they can properly heal. Rushing this kind of work will hurt both you and what you’re writing.
Compounding the long timeline for me is the fact that I’m disabled, sick with long COVID, and still holding down a day job. Even if I was writing something light and easy, the work would take a long time. The traumatic event I wrote about in Rabbit Facts occurred in 2017. I started writing the piece in 2022 and finished in late 2023.
It’s extremely frustrating to feel like you’re just dragging along, especially when the topic feels both urgent and elusive, like it will simultaneously burst out of you and bury itself further if you don’t draw it out. But I experienced the consequences of pushing too hard. It set me back.
Therapy was a crucial part of the writing process. I read some sections to my therapist as I went, but much of the time was spent just keeping me as sane and protected as possible as I thrust my hands into the fire.
Rabbit Facts would not exist without my friends, especially you. The idea of telling the world what happened to me was terrifying—so at first, I decided to just tell my friends. The first few drafts of this piece were in epistolary format: I literally just wrote you letters about what’d happened. Once I had the hardest parts on the page, I could remove those training wheels and find a shape that actually suited the story.
My friends were my first readers, my hand-holders, my editors. You all knew, at least partly, what had happened, and you all believed me, so I felt safe sharing the story both as a survivor and a writer. The input you offered made the piece infinitely stronger.
Oh—also screaming. Screaming was key.
What is it about the Bat Facts/Rabbit Facts format that you think reaches people?
My guess is that combining a difficult personal story with animal facts gives readers both some emotional breathing room and some context, a connection to the natural world. My traumatic event didn’t occur in a vacuum: I’m not remotely the only person this has ever happened to, let alone the only animal. We share so much of our DNA and so many of our biological processes and adaptations with other creatures, and so many of our experiences with one another.
Breaking an intense piece into very short sections also helps create pauses and makes the piece easier to read. We’re all so tired. Our attention spans are gone.
How did adding a speculative element to the essay help you to write it?
The first few finished versions of the piece were straight nonfiction, but I, and my early readers, could tell something was missing. What I was going through was so much bigger than I could express in mundane terms; the ending just fell flat. Once I realized that I could sort of perforate the barrier between genres, the menu of imagery I had to work with became infinite. In short, incorporating the fantastical made the piece feel much more real.
Trauma survivors often encounter disbelief when trying to tell their stories. Did it feel risky to fictionalize parts of the piece?
Very. But the solution for me was fairly straightforward; I made the magical realism-esque portions of the piece so extreme that there could be no ambiguity about when I was making things up. Aside from those obvious inventions, everything in the story is true—even the parts that are hard to believe.
Has your relationship to events that you found triggering for you changed after writing and publishing this essay?
Yes and no. The trauma anniversary still triggers my PTSD, but not like it used to. It helps a lot that what happened isn’t a secret anymore.
Telling my story has been a big part of recovery. Another part of it is the passage of time, and a lot of it, frankly, is just that that the evil bastard who hurt me is dead now. He died just a few months after I finished writing Rabbit Facts. The poetry of that is not lost on me.
What would you say to someone who wanted to write about something similar but has fears around showing it to friends and family?
You can’t predict how people will react. The book Family Trouble collects anecdotes from different writers who told their family’s stories. Each writer’s experience is unique; some are positive, some negative, most a little of each. The main thing these writers have in common is that they didn’t see the reactions coming. Someone might be totally fine with you describing domestic violence but furious you misspelled the name of the iguana they had when they were 7.
Know that you don’t have to show them. They don’t have to know. There is always a chance that they will find out and/or read it, and you need to make your peace and with that (and develop a plan for damage control) before you decide to publish. But don’t write with that outcome in mind.
Write like they’re never going to see it. In fact, write like no one is ever going to see it. Then edit responsibly, with integrity. Be fair to the people in your life, and to yourself. That’s all you can do.
Some people never show their families what they’ve written. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to be transparent with my family, as some of them were there, or at least nearby, when the event happened, and the perpetrator was their relative, too.
Sharing this piece with my loved ones prompted some huge, astonishing, relationship-altering conversations, and not the ones I expected. Your mileage will vary; take plenty of time to think about it and choose the path that makes sense for you. Your safety and wellbeing are the most important thing.
What's it been like having this story out in the world?
Difficult, at least in the beginning. The backlash inside my head when the piece came out really did a number on me. People I knew and people I didn’t were being extremely kind and supportive. This should have been great, and it was, but it also set off an intense fear response.
There was a nonstop abuser voice in my head shouting You’re a liar, you made it all up, worse things happen to other people, you don’t deserve any of this compassion, you’re disgusting, you’re doing this for attention—it was so loud, and so convincing, and I was too tired to fight it.
So I made a conscious choice to just let it excoriate me until it wore itself out. Eventually it did. And then I was just left with rawness and exhaustion, and pride in the work, and gratitude, and relief.
*Thank you to Sarah Perry for this suggestion.
Famous
I will always happily gobble up any media about the Sex Pistols. There’s something eternally appealing about the sprawling impact these kids made in a 1970s postmodern London struggling to find itself again. When I first learned about punk music in high school, I instantly became interested in the fashion and ran out to buy fishnets so I could rip holes in them. I still love punk fashion specific to the Sex Pistol’s era (a brief era, they were only together from 1975-1978) so influenced by Vivienne Westwood’s genius—that electric combo of BDSM, tartan, Victorian, cowboy, and ratty charity shop cast aways, that no one had ever seen before. Old boyfriends would sneer at my love of the Sex Pistols. “They’re just a boy band Malcolm McLaren put together,” they said. Well, so be it. The Sex Pistols are my N’SYNC. In high school I had a poster of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen linked by a pair of handcuffs on my bedroom door. I remember the day I replaced the Titanic poster that had hung there previously with it.
Danny Boyle’s Pistol (2022) is a miniseries that follows guitarist Steve Jones memoir Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol and puts him as the protagonist of the Sex Pistol’s story. Jones was the founding member of the Sex Pistols working with manager McLaren to fill out the rest of the band. Aside from one book, which I’ll get into later, I have not read any of the immediate band members, tour manager or manager’s memoirs or biographies of which there seem to be about a million, all contrasting each other’s vision of the punk rock past. Boyle’s Pistol production was sued by John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) for music licensing rights, which almost stopped the show from being aired. Lydon was firmly against Boyle’s production which he said painted him in a hostile light and created a “middle class” fantasy about the formation of the band. The court did not rule in his favour. Lydon’s distaste is interesting to me as I found Pistol’s portrayal of Johnny Rotten to be the most sympathetic in the show, aside from that of Jones himself. The Rotten we see in Pistol is nuanced, damaged, sensitive, and, surprisingly, the absolute moral centre of the band, the Cassandra who was right about everything and who no one listened to.
Critically, Pistol came down just shy of negative. And I agree, the show is a mixed bag with some clunky moments. For example, to telegraph to the audience that the Chrissie that Jones is dating is, indeed, if there was any lingering doubt!, future famous musician Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, Jones bids her farewell for the final time by saying something like, “see you later…Chrissie Hynde” lol. If you can endure these missteps, the miniseries is fun. I appreciated the cast, who are all the ages the Sex Pistols themselves would have been, and it’s astonishing to see how incredibly young they were. The cast play their own instruments and sing, which was great and added a lot to the music scenes, which I enjoyed a great deal. I especially liked the actor who played Johnny Rotten, he brought the element that Rotten himself did—while everyone else seemed like they were grounded in some way to the reality of the 1970s, Rotten looked and sounded like he was teleported in from another dimension. I also appreciated that Vivienne Westwood was a character whose importance and impact on punk was emphasised instead of glossed over, as she often is. TW—the show does get into the sexual abuse Jones was dealing with at home.
If you’d like to check out a documentary about the Sex Pistols, The Filth and The Fury (2000) is great and had more wide spread corporation among the band.
There’s also of course Sid and Nancy (1986) which is famous for Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Sid Vicious, and has Criterion Collection status, but which is derided by band members saying they were never consulted for the film. I did enjoy this film, though I would say it’s more of a fantasy about the love and destruction of these two people than a biopic. The one Sex Pistol-ish book I have read is And I Don't Want to Live This Life: A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder by Deborah Spungen, Nancy’s mother. Though compelling, I would advise a pass on this. Nancy struggled with what they thought was schizophrenia and drug addiction throughout her short life. Spungen is obviously in great pain over her daughter’s life and death. However, though she claims to want the world to know more about her daughter than just how she died, the book comes off as Spungen trying to defend herself as a good mother and person whose uncontrollable daughter was not at all her fault and holds Nancy responsible for everything. This book came out in 1983 and the way we think about families, children, parenthood and mental illness has evolved quite a lot since then. And baby boomers are the most brain worm afflicted generation, as we all know by now.
Down with the sickness
Wow, 2025’s been great so far, right? If you’re feeling like you need a pick-me-up that also holds space for your profound inner sense of doom and unwellness, here are my suggestions:
This makeup bag by Lora Zombie
A colourful bespoke pill organiser
Death Walks with Me tee from my fave illustrator, So Lazo
On a more practical note, if you are struggling to cook right now, you are not alone and I recommend You Gotta Eat by Margaret Eby, which is not so much a cookbook as a book of easy resources and ideas written by someone who’s Been There™️
I really enjoyed this <3