How to Enslave Someone

In order to take ownership of a person’s soul, you must conquer all of the figures from their past that they respect. These figures may be from their media, religion, friends, and family. The goal is to gain the approval of each of these figures in the mind of the target. If a woman loves her father, you convince her that you are the sort of person of whom her father would approve.

The alternative is to terrify the person or hold something that they love hostage, but that is never a true form of enslavement. The soul has not been conquered. It has merely been disassembled.

With this in mind, I am about to read The Disassembly of Doreen Durand by Ryan Collett. It is about a woman fighting to maintain cohesion and ownership of her soul in a world that doesn’t care about her.

It is a book about trauma, depression, and recovery, a theme that was prominent in my novel, My Adorable Apotheosis, and in a classic work by Virginia Woolf called, Mrs. Dalloway.

In each of these three novels, the protagonist witnessed the aftermath of a child’s tragic death and it marked them for life. Each protagonist dealt with this trauma in their own way. Since I’ve read Mrs. Dalloway many times, I’m not surprised that I used some of the plot elements in that book.

Mrs. Dalloway vs. My Adorable Apotheosis

1. The protagonist lost her sister at a young age and has been haunted and traumatized by it for her whole life.
2. The protagonist is pursued by a wealthy yet irresponsible man that she rejects.
3. He returns to her later in life and still wants her approval.
4. She chose to marry someone else who is less of an outsider in the system.
5. A man who failed to integrate himself into society dies.
6. The psychiatric industry threatens everyone with taking away their individual agency.
7. A main character becomes completely psychotic and suicidal.
8. The presence of a bird was used to convey the inner turmoil of a main character.
9. The protagonist confronts her fears and soldiers on.

Mrs. Dalloway vs. The Disassembly of Doreen Durand

1. The protagonist was affected by the death of a child and was traumatized by it.
2. The protagonist was pursued by a young man who she rejects.
3. A bird was used to convey the inner turmoil of a main character.
4. A main character becomes completely psychotic.
5. The protagonist’s other self (Septimus) dies at the end of the book.
6. The protagonist affirms her commitment to a responsible man at the end of the book.

Another book I read not long before I wrote my novel was This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes, so it makes sense to analyze its level of influence on my book and on The Disassembly of Doreen Durand.

This Book Will Save Your Life vs. My Adorable Apotheosis

1. After making ambitious, independent choices, X is completely disconnected and adrift.
2. X experiences a traumatic event that instigates a sort of mental break.
3. X finds a pair of mentors and attempts to reconnect to his/her past.
4. A cat symbolizes chaos and stalks the protagonist.
5. There is no romance in X’s life.
6. A disappointing relationship is described.
7. A disaster strikes X’s world and destroys it.
8. X goes out onto the ocean, leaving the chaotic world behind.

This Book Will Save Your Life vs. The Disassembly of Doreen Durand

1. X’s life seems okay until X confronts mortality and realizes he/she is completely disconnected and adrift.
2. A traumatic event instigates a mental break that causes X to wander supermarket aisles in shock. p. 37
3. While attempting to recover, X returns to the supermarket and looks for ice cream. p. 64
4. X was involved in a car accident near the supermarket and this leads X to meet a strange, new woman.
5. Breakfast and meals are frequently featured to anchor the plot.
6. A rich character pays for a fancy hotel and spa for a depressed woman character. p.100
7. There isn’t a romantic relationship between the rich character and the depressed woman.
8. The rich character is in a state of crisis and drifts away at the end of the story.

While I am not surprised by the influence of widely read books like Mrs. Dalloway or This Book Will Save Your Life on works of this genre, I am a bit surprised by the number of plot elements my book has in common with The Disassembly of Doreen Durand, a book by a man about a woman. It came out after my book and was published by Sandstone Press, the publisher that is also responsible for The Actuality and Kings of a Dead World, two books that, among others, appear to have mined my manuscript in an automated fashion for a lengthy sequence of writing prompts. Because the marketing materials of The Disassembly of Doreen Durand look like they could equally well apply to my own book, I expected that it would also show evidence of having mined my book for a set of writing prompts.

For the sake of simplicity, throughout this post, I will refer to My Adorable Apotheosis as though it encompasses both version 1 and version 2 of the manuscripts I published. There are differences, but I don’t want to complicate matters. Version 2 was published under the title: A Blazing New World and it was longer, but the first half was mostly the same as version 1.

The Disassembly of Doreen Durand vs. My Adorable Apotheosis

1. We meet the young woman protagonist.
   1. The young woman protagonist lives alone and identifies with a bird that is struggling to build/find a home. (Collett p. 4) (Hacker p. 10, 14)
   2. She used to have a female roommate to whom she felt connected, but that roommate moved up and out, completely leaving her behind and ignoring her.
   3. The discussion in which the roommates separate is quite similar. (Collett p. 6) (Hacker p. 25)
      • “Come on, you know how it is. These things move fast. What were you expecting?” … “So, you’ll be back?” Doreen asked again. … “I mean. I dunno. Probably not. No.”
      • “We’ll go where work takes us.” “But will we see each other again? Will we talk?” “Of course, but you know how things are. “
   4. A young man appears concerned with the struggling young woman, but she blows him off. (Collett p. 14) (Hacker p. 26, 33)
   5. She is stuck, disconnected, yet paralyzed.
2. We learn about her life and why she hates it.
   1. She is in a bad financial situation and barely getting by. (Collett p. 16) (Hacker p. 29)
   2. She works for a technological enterprise and doesn’t believe in how they market themselves. She is worried about whether or not her work serves a social good. (Collett p. 17) (Hacker p. 34)
   3. She wants to quit her job but doesn’t have enough money. (Collett p. 18) (Hacker p. 43)
   4. A bird is mentioned again and it represents her struggle. She is in a downward spiral but only aware of it on a metaphorical level. (Collett p. 20) (Hacker p. 50)
   5. She is nearby and unable to help when a child is killed in an accident. She hears the mother cry out in agony. (Collett p. 20, 23) (Hacker p. 14, 38)
3. We learn about how she responds to trauma. (This material was repurposed from a sequence later in my book)
   1. She witnesses a horrific car crash with blood and crushed bones. Because of the car crash, her hip is sore. She responds to the trauma by becoming abnormally hungry. (Collett p. 25) (Hacker p. 175)
   2. A young man reaches out to her and she rejects him, even though she needs support. (Collett p. 25) (Hacker p. 170)
   3. She is contacted by a pair of police officers and she doesn’t tell them what they want to know. (Collett p. 27) (Hacker p. 171)
   4. She is once again offered support by a man, but she doesn’t really engage. (Collett p. 27) (Hacker p. 176)
   5. Because of her experience with tragedy, she feels guilty about not rescuing a child/children. She has a flashback. (Collett p. 34) (Hacker p. 171)
4. We meet the supporting characters and get their backstories.
   1. The two officers represent two authorities’ approach to bureaucracy. One is more sensitive and interested in the protagonist. The other gets off on having power and isn’t interested. It is reminiscent of doctors White and Scarlett introduced at a similar point in my book. (Collett p. 30) (Hacker p. 69)
   2. She meets a mysterious stranger and is surprised by his/her teeth. This stranger gives her his/her contact info, but X is perpetually in a traumatized state. (Collett p. 39) (Hacker p. 105)
   3. The mother blames the protagonist for the child’s death even though is isn’t her fault. She had merely been a friend to the child and a witness too the tragedy. (Collett p. 56) (Hacker p. 21)
   4. An obsessive description of breakfast with eggs lends absurdity to the story, since it seems out of place and like a desperate attempt to distract herself from the tragedy. (Collett p. 74) (Hacker p. 17)
   5. X meets her otherworldly mentor again and is startled. (Collett p. 65) (Hacker p. 107, 124)
5. The protagonist is running away from those who would help her.
   1. X deliberately puts herself in danger of being in a car accident and she is rescued by her otherworldly mentor. A woman named after a flower is involved in her rescue. (Collett p. 70) (Hacker p. 176)
   2. Instead of going with the flow and doing the usual thing, she commits to following the mysterious mentor and her curiosity. (Collett p. 79) (Hacker p. 124)
   3. The young man who liked her because of her natural style comes looking for her but instead ends up in a physical confrontation with another man. It is a conflict between a system bureaucrat and a guy who is going nowhere. (Collett p. 83) (Hacker p. 134)
   4. The Dr. White analog expresses mystification and sorrow about a coworker to whom he/she felt connected and to whom he/she told many intimate details of his/her life because she quit without saying goodbye and simply disappeared. (Collett p. 91) (Hacker p. 311)
   5. Officer Palmer is again shown to be analogous to Dr. Scarlett — the sadistic rules-oriented tyrant. (Collett p. 92) (Hacker p. 142)
6. We learn about the types of friends she prefers.
   1. A woman who represents the hidden powers of the city concerns herself with art installations and statues. (Collett p. 102) (Hacker p. 26)
   2. She is impressed by a woman with nice clothes and hair who smells like berries. (Collett p. 102) (Hacker p. 28)
   3. X bonds with a mysterious female mentor character over sharing trivia. (Collett p. 106) (Hacker p. 41, 67) When two scenes that serve a similar purpose exist, they are often reversed or conflated in the rehashed text.
   4. X’s mysterious female mentor has an equally mysterious male assistant who doesn’t say much. (Collett p. 105) (Hacker p. 59)
   5. She discusses the idea that there are multiple versions of herself with a cat-like mentor. (Collett p. 111) (Hacker p. 124)
7. We learn about her mental weaknesses.
   1. X compares herself to a textile that is easily unraveled. (Collett p. 109) (Hacker p. 4 v.1) (Hacker p. 390)
   2. X goes into a fugue state in which she is haunted by the memory of the dead child. (Collett p. 111) (Hacker p. 175)
   3. We learn that the mother who lost a child has recovered from the tragedy by going on a holiday in a foreign place. She is negatively judged for this escapism, but also forgiven. (Collett p. 147) (Hacker p. 188)
   4. We see that the man she rejected is still interested in her. (Collett p. 152) (Hacker p. 190)
   5. There is a comment/example about how many grown ups in the city still think and act like children. Collett p. 153) (Hacker p. 191) (Hacker p. 18 v.1)
8. There is a cluster of plot elements that are extracted from book two of this story while everything else comes from book 1 (the first 300 pages).
   1. We learn about a reality tv star who has been disabled by addiction. (Collett p. 155) (Hacker p. 382)
   2. “Click, Click, Click, Click” ends an episode of an empty, modern romantic relationship. (Collett p. 156) (Hacker p. 454)
   3. A character named Cara gets involved with one of the men who was interested in the protagonist. (Collett p. 159) (Hacker — My Caustic Conjecture)
   4. There is a psychic who latches onto the ‘signal’ of a young woman and feels responsible for helping her. They have a magical, whirlwind relationship. (Collett p. 174) (Hacker p. 422)
   5. A whimsical naval battle is described. (Collett p. 230) (Hacker p. 408)
9. We learn about her relationships to people to whom she feels close.
   1. X’s wealthy friend takes her to places she couldn’t otherwise afford. (Collett p. 165) (Hacker p. 390) (Hacker p. 6 v.1)
   2. X considers that she has met her mirror image self and that they exchange energy as on two sides of a trampoline or see-saw. (Collett p. 167) (Hacker p. 177)
      • ‘What if, as she was recovering from the brink, Violet was sinking down into it, as if they were on a see-saw together. If one of them was up, the other was down. Opposites, eternally swirling around each other. One’s high dependent on the other’s low. The thought crossed and kept moving.’
      • ‘Imagine that space is a trampoline which Alix jumps off of while Bob is lying on it. While she is travelling through space, Bob is vibrating back and forth on his trampoline relative to Aix. This is why it makes sense to say that Bob has a lot of relativistic mass from Alix’s perspective. Vibrating a system makes the things in the system look more massive.’
   3. One woman describes how she has developed a theory of another woman’s mind and that she must work to get used to her strange mode of expression. (Collett p. 168) (Hacker p. 102) This one is a stretch.
      • ‘She brushed aside the odd way Violet had said that: “what’s inside your head”. She was used to her strange sentence structure. It was often odd, but there was never anything that required parsing. She was exact and specific at least in that senses. ‘
      • ‘”What?” I often had a hard time understanding ARIEL’s logic. “Never mind. Sorry. My theory of your mind isn’t complete.”‘
   4. She tries to explain her psychological situation with physics metaphors. (Collett p. 169) (Hacker p. 110)
      • ‘It was like the world had fallen through a funnel but I was still up at the top, unable to go through it. I felt this incredible sense of isolation, like I was alone, but under a magnifying glass… the perpetrator of all that dread was finally revealed to be just me, or an inversion of myself.’
      • After being driven by loneliness to discover that she could use the machine’s microscope to talk to herself, she concludes ‘Maybe we’ve opened a connection to a parallel universe and I am talking with another version of myself.’
   5. X’s mentor uses very technical modes of expression, as though she is a robot or AI. It isn’t clear if the mentor can help the crazy young woman. (Collett p. 175) (Hacker p. 115)
      • ‘It made your signal all the stronger, and now that you’re coming back into a normal presentation, I’ve lost the signal, and I lack the ability to help you any further.’
      • ‘”communicating in Morse code with someone who was modulating the luminosity signal in response to the modulations I made…” “You are clearly so befuddled by convention there is no reaching you.”‘
10. We return to her relationship with work.
    1. Her mind feels foggy while having to deal with a room full of strange people who are negotiating distasteful business deals of which she wants no part (fracking/fucking). She concludes the meeting by rejecting the business proposal. (Collett p. 179) (Hacker p. 47)
    2. We get a compact portrait of a woman from infancy through young adulthood. “I have a memory of” or “She remembers” is the refrain. (Collett p. 189) (Hacker p. 10)
    3. We get a compact description of a woman who meets a man, marries him, and then quickly conquers the world with him. Despite having done this together, she still gets no respect while he is given deference. (Collett p. 192) (Hacker p. 257)
    4. Because of money, a female mentor character is able to remain looking very young despite being very old. (Collett p. 193) (Hacker p. 420) **this whole section reads as though it were written by a different, much older author.
    5. An origin story about a woman who has complete financial control over the world is given. (Collett p. 196) (Hacker p. 213)
11. We learn how she relates to organizations with power.
    1. X breaks a machine associated with the workplace she hated and that fired her. She also listens to a woman with power explain to her how power dynamics work. (Collett p. 182) (Hacker p. 235)
    2. X meets the rulers of her world in the capacity of being a lowly assistant. She guides them away from their destructive plans. (Collett p. 200) (Hacker p. 395)
    3. X is in a relationship with a person who makes deals — a sleek businessperson. She is learning from this person and makes a deal herself. (Collett p. 205) (Hacker p. 431)
    4. A man and woman who don’t like one another are stuck together in a beach location. She is only interested in sex while he is pining away for and searching for a woman he lost due to circumstances beyond his control. (Collett p. 216) (Hacker p. 336, 365) The situation repeats with genders reversed.
    5. X is sent on a high profile tour as a representative of a wealthy, powerful organization. (Collett p. 230) (Hacker p. 264)
12. X encounters many distractions from her fundamental problem
    1. A powerful person reminds X of the difficulties associated with memory erasure from a human mind. (Collett p. 231) (Hacker p. 272)
    2. On the same page that she describes traveling to other worlds in a psychological sense, she also describes a mermaid. X struggles with her identity as she trades places with another version of herself, jumping from life to life. (Collett p. 241) (Hacker p. 305)
    3. She is confronted with different versions of her self and isn’t sure which one she will become. This struggle with knowledge of the self is represented through the analogy of looking through — not just into – a mirror. (Collett p. 241, 243) (Hacker p. 70, 300, 305)
    4. She is stopped on the street by a stranger who treats her as though they know one another well. They communicate about a location in the city where they are staying. She ends up embracing this stranger and parts from them in a bewildered state. (Collett p. 236) (Hacker p. 298)
    5. An abstract statue is used to mirror X’s inner state as she falls apart and that state is split between the depressed mother and the protected baby. (Collett p. 247) (Hacker p. 274)
13. The protagonist is reborn/killed at the end of the book.
    1. We are given a scene of a mother and daughter as the mother is letting go of life and accepting her impending death. The mother has re-created herself and is ready to leave the world. (Collett p. 251) (Hacker p. 579)
    2. She experiences a scene that describes what it is like to be born — as in, like a baby. (Collett p. 253) (Hacker p. 10, 583)
    3. While following an authority figure into a dark space, she gets confused and calls out the name of her old roommate. It is a completely inappropriate thing to do. Then she falls to the ground. (Collett p. 255) (Hacker p. 53)
    4. She calls out the name of the dead child. (Collett p. 255) (Hacker p. 38)
    5. A woman is cannibalized. (Collett p. 261) (Hacker p. 256)
14. The protagonist finds a type of love from a mother and a man at the end of the book.
    1. The man who is interested in her literally chases her around and she evades him. (Collett p. 265) (Hacker p. 79)
    2. A man and woman meet in the night. One of them falls from a great height and requires medical attention for a broken spine. Paralysis looks possible but turns out to not be in the cards. (Collett p. 266) (Hacker p. 14)
    3. The man who loved/pursued her accidentally kills himself. (Collett p. 266) (Hacker p. 247)
    4. A character is in an accident and gets severely injured with a broken bone and bleeding. (Collett p. 267) (Hacker p. 175)
    5. X reconnects with the mother who lost her children and feels a sense of closure after shared reminiscence, even though there isn’t any real love between them. (Collett p. 275) (Hacker p. 359)

I do not think it was an accident that the individual plot elements tend to be grouped into 5 element mythemes. I’ve seen this pattern in most of the copied books I’ve analyzed and I bet that it is a feature of the software tool used to facilitate the copying. Even though there is a lot of randomness in how the points are arranged, there are a lot of them and 26 of the points rest on the main storyline of book 1. Less material was taken from book 2. I would challenge anyone to find as many overlaps in any of the control variables from the genre.

Overall, the bones of this book remind me of my book while the flesh reminds me of an assortment of other *traumatized person in a downward spiral finds romance and self acceptance* books. I believe that these degrees of similarity can be quantified and used to show how my book was used as a detailed scaffolding upon which a collection of other people’s downward spiral musings were hung like so many Christmas ornaments selected by a man from London.

I was bothered by the pretense of the author when I saw that he wrote about a Waffle House in Atlanta that served pancakes, french fries, and hash browns covered in gravy. Anyone in the US knows darn well that Waffle House doesn’t serve pancakes and french fries and that gravy is never served over hash browns. At Waffle House, you put chili on hash browns and gravy on biscuits. I should know. I once worked there. To order a couple of waffles with two eggs over easy with whole wheat toast and onion, tomato, cheese, hash browns with ham, chili, and jalapenos, I would stand on a mark and call out to the line cook:

“Waffle on two out like one. Order over light plate scattered smothered, covered chunked, diced, peppered, and topped whole wheat.”

The cooks there didn’t take paper orders. They used a non-verbal memory system involving plates and packets of condiments placed in certain locations and this enabled them to hold up to ten tables of orders in their heads all at once.

Waffle House provides a wonderful case study for the limits of human memory in which menu items are encoded with a form of symbolic data compression that reminds me of how software packages rehash books by turning a novel into a pattern of numbers that correspond to certain archetypes and themes.

That, of course, isn’t how human authors work. We don’t come up with a memory system involving plates and condiment packets to represent the Hero’s Journey and then cook that same product up a hundred times per day — unless our goal is to fill the literary landscape with a single recipe that drowns out all others. Rather, we know that certain archetypes can be plugged into certain, familiar recipes to make something marketable, but we also know that no one will buy that product at franchises across the country if it doesn’t have some spark of originality to it. People like a consistent product that tastes like it came directly from the person who invented the recipe.

Since Collett’s Waffle House scene showed he’d never been to a Waffle House, I could tell that he was not creating original material and did not invent the recipe with which he was cooking. Of course, every woman in a downward spiral invents her own unique recipe of desperation and whenever an author tells the story of such a woman, he is not only stealing it from the woman who lived that life, but if he is using her diary or literary work as a resource without attribution, he is also stealing from her in the sense of copyright infringement.

Collett is not the only male Londoner who has recently decided to sell products created with a story template and story ingredients about unhappy young women going crazy due to their independent modern lives. Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library also used my book as a template in a similar fashion without attributing it.

Just because they sampled different ingredients from my book and used different seasoning packets to disguise their book construction method doesn’t make what they did less wrong.

The Midnight Library vs. The Disassembly of Doreen Durand

1. A young woman is struggling with a job and life she hates. She lives alone and is extremely depressed.
2. She puts herself in mortal danger and is rescued by a mysterious, otherworldly female mentor. p. 65
3. This magical mentor has access to systems that can know everything about the protagonist.
4. She gets a new life in which she wears nice clothes.

The Midnight Library vs. My Adorable Apotheosis

1. We meet the unhappy protagonist. On the first pages of both books, we learn that her young adulthood was marked by her father’s sudden departure after she made a choice he didn’t like. Her mother was sick and effectively absent. (Haig. p. 1, 2, 17) (Hacker p. 3, 5, v.2)
2. She is a philosopher at heart and torn by her choice to leave or remain in her small town. (Haig p. 10) (Hacker p. 9)
3. She takes refuge from her broken relationships in a job and life she doesn’t like. She feels insufficient in comparison to a pretty, a marriage oriented woman with dyed hair. She expresses her alienation by explaining that she feels like an animal in the zoo. (Haig p. 11, 15, 15) (Hacker p. 9, 11, 75)
4. She’s not in love with the guy who wants her. He’s a substance abuser who is going nowhere, but she feels like she should like him more than she does. She doesn’t hate him. (Haig p. 12, 16, 30, 48) (Hacker p. 9, 13, 28, 32)
5. Her job is so dissatisfying that she is barely holding on. She uses an analogy about physics to express her despair. (Haig p. 8, 19) (Hacker p. 22, 21)
6. She almost dies due to drugs and disillusionment. Worries about her life choices trigger her descent into desperation, strong drugs, panicked hallucination, and a calmer multiverse madness. (Haig p. 22, 20, 25, 26) (Hacker p. 27, 28, 36, 39). Strangely enough, flowers and drugs are mentioned in the same place in this sequence in both books. (Haig p. 20) (Hacker p. 30)
7. Both authors used a countdown to disaster format. Haig (p. 2–26) used this format in his published work and Hacker (p. 2–54 in v. 2) used this format in the version (v. 2) of the work she submitted to agents and published online.
8. She writes a note to herself. (Haig p. 23) (Hacker ~p. 23 in v. 2)
9. She thinks about how she did what she wanted to do rather than what her mother wanted her to do — get married to a local guy. (Haig p. 36) (Hacker ~p. 36 in v. 2)
10. She passes out and when she wakes up in a strange, otherworldly space surrounded by racks of books/electronics. She then meets the quasi-human, ghostly, female mentor who is intimately connected to the machine.library that will serve as the central element of the story. (Haig p. 27) (Hacker p. 42)
11. A ghostly female mentor figure who operates a computer control system is used to structure and pace the story. She learns from this mentor about how the machine works and about how her life might turn out. Directly after this conversation, she struggles with a decision about whether she would like to be with her drug addicted boyfriend in a type of bar. (Haig p. 30, 39, 40) (Hacker p. 43, 49, 54)
12. She tries to decide if she could like her drug abusing boyfriend and seeks advice from the ghostly female mentor, but gets noncommittal answers. She concludes that cats are the solution to her problem. (Haig p. 56, 62, 63) (Hacker p. 56, 62, 64)
13. She talks about cats with her ghostly female mentor, toxoplasmosis is mentioned, she understands that she is bored at work, and her ghostly female mentor commiserates. She wonders what her life would’ve been like if she had taken her father’s advice. (Haig p. 69, 76, 79, 83, 87) (Hacker p. 69, 80, 63, 80, 82)
14. She speaks with her ghostly female mentor about what motivates her, thinks about cats again, and wraps up the chapter with the ghostly female mentor who operates a computer control system in an otherworldly place filled with racks of books/electronics. (Haig p. 87, 88, 117) (Hacker p. 87, 89, 120)
15. The final discussion with this ghostly female mentor is about whether or not she had free will in what had transpired. (Haig p. 288-the last page) (Hacker p. 297-the last page)
16. and so on for 65 points….

For the full comparison of The Midnight Library and My Adorable Apotheosis, please take a look at the link above. In general, it is strange that these two men from London have chosen to write from the perspective of young women.

I should repeat this exercise with another classic of the *depressed young woman* genre: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

The Bell Jar vs. My Adorable Apotheosis

1. She is a young woman from the countryside who got a chance to move to the city because she was clever and pretty.
2. In the city, she has a slutty female friend who is happy to have her along as they hunt for men, but their connection is not for life.
3. She is feels inadequate and jealous of rich, pretty women who do nothing but act as beautiful objects for wealthy men.
4. The first scene in which she is out in the city is set in a bar where she meets a man who doesn’t really attract her. She gets drunk and slobbered on by him, but takes it in stride.
5. Poetry and song lyrics are used to spice up the narrative.
6. Someone does something unwanted to a person of the opposite sex’s ear.
7. There is the implication that she let down her slutty friend because she was determined to be better than her — more prim and proper.
8. She studied physics and was good at it.
9. She has to meet with a type of professor to decide about her future.
10. There is a man who wants to marry her that she doesn’t like because she thinks he is dumb.
11. She got stuck with a guys who had a limp or a disability or ugliness.
12. A guy she doesn’t like leaves a letter for her at her dorm.
13. She goes to a lab.
14. If I consider the longer version of my story, there is a scene with a woman on a medical table with stirrups in both books.
15. She was in a relationship with a guy who cheated on her.
16. She describes herself as a firework.
17. She imagines her life as a housewife and decides it isn’t for her.
18. The guy who wants her wrote a poem.
19. She is in an accident and breaks a bone.
20. She goes home from the city to visit her mother and meets an old friend who has a bunch of kids.
21. There is a man/woman named Dodo.
22. “I am, I am” is something said by people/someone confirming their/her commitment to life.
23. She gets an invasive psychiatric treatment.
24. She is electrically shocked and it saves her life.

What is funny is that I read The Bell Jar twenty years ago and I don’t remember it being as long and unfocused as the version I just went through. I’m also surprised that I got the name Dodo from it.

The Bell Jar vs. The Midnight Library

1. She is an artist stuck in a pedestrian job.
2. She ends up in a bar with a guy she doesn’t want to sleep with.
3. She meets a beautiful man, but it also doesn’t work out.
4. She meets a crazy man, but it doesn’t work either.
5. Her most promising love interest is a doctor.
6. She is drawn to her ambitious dreams and feels sad that she isn’t able to attain them.
7. She is threatened by depression and suicide after feeling unable to make the right choices in life.
8. She grows comfortable with the idea of being a mother.
9. Her crisis is communicated to the media.

The Bell Jar vs. The Disassembly of Doreen Durand

1. She is a young woman who doesn’t know what to do with her life.
2. She watches her closest friend kill herself.

The Bell Jar vs. Mrs. Dalloway

1. She hears about a person who committed suicide.
2. She is afraid of the mental hospital.

What does all of this mean? Does it mean that a pair of men living in London simultaneously decided to write a pair of books from the perspective of a depressed young woman and they both accidentally chose to use the same set of 65-100 plot elements as me because those plot elements describe something universally true about depressed young women in Britain and Oregon today? Or did this happen because those men were both working from templates that had been drawn from a book (or books!) written by a woman (or women!) who had real-life experience with being young, alone, female, and unhappy?

What if they both had access to a software packet that made writing a novel as easy as playing a game of Tetris?

Spun sentences appear and disappear after a few seconds and all the “author” has to do is select the sentences that *fit*.

I think that with enough data, this sort of puzzle need not be mysterious… even though I am mystified by the author of this book.

He has some knitting videos on YouTube and I just wish I didn’t have to see so many people wearing sweaters made with my wool and design template. I mean, I know they unraveled the sweater I knitted, mixed it with a bunch of other wool, and then sent it through their sweater-making machine after programming it with my pattern, but at least they could acknowledge that they didn’t come up with the pattern. I know, I know. There are only so many ways to knit a sweater. There just seems to be a difference between hand knit and machine knit.. the soul of the knitter? Knowing your knitter? Respecting human ingenuity? I wonder what Philip K. Dick would say. He’s probably still busy wondering if androids dream of electric sheep which is another question entirely.

……..

The image in the header is, of course, from the Terminator franchise and it reminded me of how Doreen Durand’s mentor met her demise. It was a very Terminator-esque scene.