In the latter half of the novel, Alice explains – in meta terms – what haunted houses are really about: “It is about structure, architecture, and history.” In Jackson’s novel, the house feeds off Eleanor’s mental illness. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and especially its classic opening lines, are a repeated, paraphrased refrain: ‘For one live organism to continue to exist, another live organism must stop existing altogether,’ we are told. Later on, Rumfitt writes: ‘Ghosts are born from trauma and violence.’ The answers that come are complicated and uncomfortable, as the truth so often is.
Was it really haunted? “Maybe I am haunting myself, maybe I have always been haunting myself,” Alice says early on. The question – what really happened in the house? – lingers throughout the novel. Alice, a trans woman, has spent the years since trying to block the trauma a brown stain that resembles Hannah’s face is covered up with a poster of a problematic singer Ila has lost herself to an extremist cause, becoming a poster-child for it. Only Alice and Ila emerged, both with diverging, traumatic recollections as to what happened in there. Three years ago, Alice, Ila, and Hannah entered a haunted house. Rumfitt never names them, preferring instead ‘the TV writer’ or ‘the singer’, but these real-life horrors constantly bleed through into the novel. That same TV writer appears in the pages of Tell Me I’m Worthless, among a number of other personalities and pop culture figures who have fallen down the rabbit hole of extremism. Together, Alice and Ila must face the horrors that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, whom the House has chosen to make its own.Ĭutting, disruptive, and darkly funny, Tell Me I’m Worthless is a vital work of trans fiction that examines the devastating effects of trauma and how fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other.T he week I started r eading Alison Rumfitt’s tremendous debut novel, a small group of Twitter users rallied around a hashtag trying to reinstate the account of a TV writer turned nasty anti-trans troll.
Memories of that night torment Alice, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, to go past the KEEP OUT sign and over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, Alice knows she must go. She lives a haunted existence, selling videos of herself for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep. Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends, Ila and Hannah. A dark, unflinching haunted house story that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors through the lens of the modern-day trans experience
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