My Experiments with Truth

 My Experiments with Truth (title after the Gandhi text) is a literary memoir by Bethany Reivich, an American philosopher, anthropologist and former sex worker living in Barcelona. Written in a strikingly disarmed, equivocal voice, simultaneously naive and over-knowing, My Experiments tracks the threads of a shape-shifting self as it undergoes radical instability and refuses the pressure to brand, streamline, or “heal” through facile narrativising. Unlike Gandhi, her vehicle for truth includes wading through economies of power and eros, and the radical loss of shared reality.

After being orphaned by the death of her psychoanalyst father and his patient-wife, rejected by well-to-do relatives, and passed through over a dozen foster homes in rural Kansas, Bethany, an undiagnosed autistic epileptic, punky savant, and catastrophic truth-seeker, finds her way to one of the best philosophy programs in the country, where her trouble truly begins: normie rich kids arguing over Greek declensions and the semiotics of “fate.” Out of place in every register—high, low, institutional, countercultural, she sets off hitchhiking across continents, culminating in Russia, where a mystical-psychotic collapse reorganises her perception permanently.

From life as the muse of a Thai Buddhist teacher, to a Victorian courtship with a South African sangoma, to working as a luxury escort in Barcelona, Bethany remains committed to experience as method. The narration begins in Barcelona, where a hallucinatory intellectual affair with the White Duke himself, a poetry-loving, neo-fascist polemicist in the Catalan nationalist milieu, offers the friction she needs to finally enunciate the cosmology she’s built across twenty years of exile.

A rotating cast appears: a nationalist politician, escort colleagues who teach her what it means to be a woman, lauded yet hilariously incompetent psychoanalysts, friends and lovers obsessed with producing the unruly muse while terrified of meeting her where she actually is. She braids anthropology, foster care, class, music, sex work, phenomenology, regional speech and linguistics, fashion semiotics, body memory, conundrums of inter-cultural mysticism, Midwestern sociology, symbolic violence, and humor into a dense perceptual field. Despite its saturation in the grotesque, every portrait is rendered with an unusual dignity of attention.

“Write,” her impotent lovers tell her as they reject her. As she begins to tell her story, she frees herself from the burden of other peoples’ meaning — any meaning at all — yet somehow, the unreliable narrator begins to sound more convincing than her critics.

Waking life behaves with dream-logic, which the narrator reads outward--as a way institutions, erotic economies, and social scenes arrange themselves. Loathing the solipsism of psychology, she refuses to reduce these experiences to private symbolism. Instead of tidy meaning, music, both in the book’s content and its structure, provides scaffolding, tempo, counterpoint, and unresolved harmonic pressure. Each section is a self-contained fugue that flows into the larger structure.

My Experiments refuses easy digestion. On the surface, the book remains strangely readable, funny, and intimate, but its shifting tonal logic gradually alters the ground beneath the reader: sincerity, performance, madness, and insight stop appearing as stable opposites.

Formally, the work joins a lineage including Hélène Cixous’ écriture féminine, Clarice Lispector, Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick, and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, but distinguishes itself with a voice that is raw, irreverent, and destabilising. At approximately 80,000 words, My Experiments with Truth book enters conversations around embodiment, capitalism, spirituality, madness, femininity, and symbolic breakdown, while ultimately operating on a larger terrain: the book's subject is perception itself and the search for a relation capable of meeting her beyond the collapse of inherited meaning.