Books That Built Me: Habitus
This is the first in a series of posts about the books that helped shape who I am and how I write. And this book? It changed everything.
On my fifteenth birthday I had just moved into temporary accomodation, and stuff was everywhere. I hadn't really given what I wanted for my birthday much thought, but was delighted to be furnished with several colourful pairs of socks (I love colourful socks) and a couple of new books to sink my teeth into.
One of them was Habitus by James Flint. I fell in love with the cover before I had even opened it. Stark black and white, chequered, marked with strange symbols and mismatched typography. It looked different. Weird. I could relate.
Lots of words have been used to describe Flint’s debut novel. “Disturbing,” “funny,” and “unabashedly postmodern” still appear in reviews to this day. At fifteen, I’m not sure I knew what ‘postmodern’ even meant, but I inhaled all 560 pages of it within a week. Then I read it again.
And again. And again.
The story itself is gloriously absurd. Laika, the dog launched into space by the Russians in 1957, is alive and well in her capsule above Earth, feeding on satellite data. A precocious teen (something I could relate to at the time) seduces two people, becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a child with two fathers who also turns out to be psychic.
I won't spoil the ending - but someone turns into a rock, someone turns into a tree, and someone has a Lawnmower-Man-style conversion into pure data via a malfunctioning 33k modem.
It sounds unhinged. But somehow, it all felt real. The blend of fact and fiction was so well-done it could almost all have been true. The line between fact and fiction was so convincingly blurred that I found myself writing lists of questions to Ask Jeeves the next time I was allowed to plug my computer into the phone line.
Learning From Weirdness
By the time I read Habitus, I’d already written plenty of short stories, poems, and bits of fanfiction. I loved to write, but I was formulaic about it. I think that’s a common experience for autistic kids. You follow patterns. You mimic the structures you’ve seen in other people’s work.
But along came this brilliantly weird, unbelievably believable story that shattered every convention. It didn’t just give me permission to be strange in my writing. It made that strangeness feel unashamedly like strength.
I still remember the first thing I wrote after reading Habitus. It was a half-poem, half-story wondering what would happen if the butterflies in our stomachs were real, living butterflies. Born into our bodies, only to be destroyed by them. I showed it to my best friend Sophie. I think she liked it. I should try and dig it out sometime. Maybe I’ll share it here.
Ripples in Time
My fifteenth birthday feels a lifetime ago, but the impact of Habitus has never left me. My upcoming novel (out next year) blends science fiction themes into standard modern life, folding the weird in with the mundane. I don’t think I’d have had the courage to do that if Habitus hadn’t shown me what was possible. I think that the playfulness I have with genre, my refusal to colour inside the lines, my willingness to be odd on purpose — that seed was planted by this book.
I often say the things that make us human are our choices and experiences. I’m the sum of everything I’ve ever read, seen, or loved. Habitus lives on in me and in the things that I write - kind of like a creative echo - only ever a pageturn away.
Habitus is one of the Books that Built Me. There are so many more to tell you about. I hope you'll stick around for the next chapter.
