She Must Be Mad: the bestselling poetry debut of 2018
‘Poetry meets mental health in Charly Cox’s brave and beautiful She Must Be Mad.’ Stylist Magazine‘Reading this book made me feel less alone.’ MashableShe Must be Mad explores coming-of-age: the pain and beauty of love, the relief and the agony of turning from girl to woman, the isolation of an untethered mind and the power and subjugation of the body.Charly captures the formative experiences of today’s young women from the poignant to the prosaic in writing that is at once witty, wry and heartfelt. Wayward nights out that don’t go as planned; the righteous anger at those men with no talent or skill or smarts who occupy the most powerful positions in the world; the strange banality of madness and, of course, the hurt and indecision of unrequited love.For every woman surviving and thriving in today’s world, for every girl who feels too much; this is a call for communion, and you are not alone.
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she must be mad
Charly Cox
A mental coming-of-age documented through poetry and prose written by someone who’s still in the thick of it
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ 2018
Copyright © Charly Cox 2018
Charly Cox asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in this work are of the author’s imagination. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events or localitites is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook edition © July 2018 ISBN 9780008291679
Version: 2018-09-17
contents
For the men who broke my heart...
I wish I’d not spent so long crying in bed
For the men who broke my heart, for the beta-blockers that slowed it, and a chunk of what is left to the sisterhood with a gift tag wrapped around it reading: let’s try and figure this all out together.
I owe this all to my madness and those who have suffered it. I never thought I’d be a poet. I never knew one day I’d slap a title on a cover that encased sometimes lonely and sometimes excited thoughts and say, ‘Here it is! A book of poems! By me, Charly … The Poet!’ But life shocks you and here we all are. In that never tense, I didn’t know a thing – I just knew how to feel. I took to feeling like a sport and I exercised every one of those achy heartstrings that had festered in cliché drivel until they snapped and aortic wells poured and shouted, ‘For god’s sake woman, can you just write these feelings down so we can have a break?’ And so I did. For years in silence and secrecy. I wrote these poems and letters to my past self and in every sort of melodramatic, romantic, ridiculous way, these are what saved me. Saved me from an intensity I was afraid to share until I morphed them into something to share with you now. Some of these were written at sixteen, others at twenty-two; they were all written growing and lost and sad sunk, but they were also all written with eventual hope. A hope that I clung to in the most intense way that only a girl desperate to take a peek at womanhood, battling a wealthy portfolio of mental health issues nervously, could. Finding strength in the contention of such frustrated confusion, in odd and debilitating sadness, in jubilant first kisses and clangs of clarity – in the words of our lord saviour Britney Spears, ‘I’m not a girl – not yet a woman’. And there is something truly quite almighty in that in-between … either that or, I must truly just be mad.
Nobody ever tells you that there’ll be comedians and poets, actors and academics, college students and forty-year-old men to fall in love with.
That you will fall in love with them all.
Their charm and their poise, their anecdotes and foreign phrases, even the stray scratchy hairs on their cheeks and chins that will tickle like an acrylic yarn against your youth.
They first come soft. Soft and slow and ethereal, these perfumed clouds of promise that smell new but hang old, and then before a single tendril has had time to make itself at home on your collar, they exit loud and angry and too early.
They will always exit too early.
