Book Review || Verity (2018)
"Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. "
: 🌕 : SPOILER ALERT : 🌕 :
It is important to note that the majority of the themes explored in this book deal with sensitive subject matters. My review, therefore, touches on these topics as well. Many people might find the subject matters of the book & those detailed in my review overwhelming. I would suggest you steer clear of both if this is the case. Please note that from this point forward I will be writing about matters that contain reflections on the death of a child, Postpartum Depression, self-induced abortion, self-mutilation of a minor, psychological distress, child endangerment, distorted body image, disordered eating, intentional violence against a minor, & others.
“I was good at spewing bullshit. It's why I became a writer.”
In the warm setting of the Vermont countryside where a house resides, in which a family lives, lays the body of Verity Crawford; a woman who thinks so highly of herself & subsequently of authors across the globe that she remained chronically disorganized & untidy throughout her entire literary career.
A series of miscommunications with Jeremy, the man with whom she proclaims to be deeply entrenched in love & adoration leads to her near death, after the morbid passings of their twin daughters.
Following the dual timelines of Lowen, a benign author who refused to work at any job which would sustain her livelihood, as well as Verity’s journal entries which we are meant to believe are transcripts to an autobiography; the story sequesters itself forlornly into the obvious which is imbecilic behaviours, unbelievable coincidences & tendencies towards horrific child abuse as though it were simply another Tuesday afternoon in the Crawford residence.
I would like to make it clear that should you have made it to this point in my review, the following paragraphs will explicitly detail the scenes in which gore, violence & abuse towards children will be written about. As well, before moving forward I would like to highlight that I am not someone who is professionally in a position to make remarks on the authentic representation of mental illnesses &/or disorders. Therefore, my comments should be recognized as coming from someone who read through this book without educational weight to back my impressions & opinions.
I acknowledge that the subject matters presented throughout this book are important to write about. Regardless of whether the works are fiction or non-fiction, there are women across the globe who have experienced & continue to be subjected to the catastrophic battle between their intentions & their mental health.
This story presents the reader with the alleged autobiographical entries of Verity while she explicitly states her desire to self-abort her children throughout the entirety of her pregnancy. She writes about throwing herself down flights of stairs, heavily utilizing substances & finally, taking a wire hanger & attempting to abort the fetuses who are on the cusp of being delivered.
This is incredibly tragic. It is in no way easy to work through a story that details the actions of a woman who has given the reader no reasons to empathize with her while she acts in ways that may easily be linked with what is known to the public as Perinatal Depression.
Here is where my first qualm with this story arises. The reader is given insight into all of the characters in this book through a dual timeline & dual points of view; that of Lowen & that of Verity. Lowen, as the main narrator of the story, is a total & complete moron in every sense of the word. There are zero redeeming features about this character & it was a mistake to have this story led by her compass, one which falters at every opportunity.
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Stories that ask the reader to follow a character with little substance to them as they make their way through spooky scenes are ridiculous & flawed to the point of failure. There is no instance in which the reader is given reason to believe that Lowen is a character they can trust, nor are we given reason to believe that Lowen has any functioning membranes that would aid in propelling this plot forward in a meaningful way.
The first instance in which we meet Lowen is when she witnesses a person get their head crushed by an oncoming vehicle in the middle of New York. She proceeds to lie to her agent about why she is wearing less than professional clothes, as her top is drenched in blood; Why would she do that?
What does it bring to the story to have the main character be a liar? Are we meant to believe that this would be the case of an unreliable narrator? I do not think nor did I, for one instance, believe, that Lowen had enough going for her to be dimensional in any way.
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Chronic lying runs rampant in this story & though I appreciate that this can be a way for the author to riddle tensions into the plot, this was not the case here. Characters hid truths for the simple sake of hiding them. Another example of this is Lowen lying to her agent about being evicted from her home because he doesn’t care on a personal level.
It does not matter that he was not to be the boyfriend of your dreams, this is a professional relationship at this point & if you refuse to work any other jobs to pay for your livelihood it is his business to be aware that his client is homeless by their own volition.
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What is the purpose of pursuing a career as an author if all we hear about from Lowen is how much she hates all the responsibilities that come along with writing a piece of work which one might hope to be published & subsequently bought? Get another job. It is boring & trite to spend the entire 300+ pages complaining about your finances & your work requirements when you do nothing to change the situation. I emphasize the flaws in Lowen’s character as we follow her throughout every chapter of this story & it is painful.
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As the story progressed through the entries I began to wonder at what stage in this book I was going to feel any level of intrigue towards what was happening. Asking me to believe that the obvious journal entries were what was going to be an autobiography was comedic. Asking me to trust that Lowen, as a writer, would recognize the difference between cruelly drafted notes & an actual book, was comedic. Asking me to believe that Verity would not have listed the journal as being an actual practice journal for her books was comedic. There were too many comedic instances in the story that may lead the reader to feel serious & perturbed. This leads me to my next qualm.
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This story has been done before, many times & yet here we are reading it through the lens of women who are presented in shadows of themselves; empty voids of what women are, to please an unknown assailant who views women as sacks of skin void of the complexities which befall every a human being.
The repetition of pornographic sexual encounters, written in ways that ooze desperation, juvenility & a lack of plot devices renders this story to be a completely vapid piece of work. How do you seek to present the very real & horrific experiences of women who experience levels of depression during pregnancy, after children are brought into the home, etc., only to have that topic drowned out by the overly utilized erotica bombarding the chapters in this book? You are doing a gigantic disservice to women.
Not a single scene in which graphic sexual activities were being presented was of value to the plot. Never once was something beneficial to the advancement of a character, a series of events, or the presentation of world-building as a whole. Lest we look past many of the scenes which were being described in this story & forget that the activities being presented were done non-consensually.
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If a person is asleep they are non-consenting. I acknowledge that people in the real world may have an understanding between themselves & their partners for instances such as this. However, in this book sexual activities were done in the hopes of fixing a situation, of manipulating someone else so that they were not given the chance to speak their piece. It is not cool, quirky, romantic, intriguing or engaging to read about people who perform sexual acts on their sleeping partners.
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Putting chauvinism aside, the ideologies presented in this book might render many a reader to feel disgusted. Crew, a five-year-old child is written as slicing a butter knife through his gums because he is being questioned by Lowen about his mother & her physical capabilities.
It does not take a professional psychologist to clock that this child is under a severe amount of duress. The mutilation which takes place truly boils this plot to the brim with the necessity for the reader to find some form of solid ground on which to rest. Yet, in the place of logical forward movement, we see Lowen become pregnant with a man she does not know. Then, she finds a letter.
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Stories in which the reader is gifted a key piece through a letter written by a secondary character rarely work. One often finds that the letters are far too detailed to be simply a piece of correspondence. This story falls into the intentional victimhood of such a practice.
When Lowen comes across the letter written by Verity the entire story is revealed to her with citations, recapitulations, full scenes, etc. This is a letter that she wrote to Jeremy to advise him that the journals he found were not real & that she did not, in fact, think about murdering her children, nor did she intentionally leave one of her children in a lake to drown; she did not stick her adult fingers two at a time, down the esophagus of her new-born baby in the hopes of having her choke to death on her vomit; she did not have a mental illness, she did not have nor experience any of the things that we spent the entire book reading about.
Are we to understand that Hoover thought it was appropriate to have a character simply adopt the mentality of someone experiencing a catatonic state of suffering to be a better author? Is this supposed to be read as being interesting & forward-thinking?
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Jeremy, having found the journal entries, which Verity used as practice for her actual writing, thought that his wife did believe, act, & think in all the ways she wrote. Does it not say something innate that your life partner believes you to have been capable of murdering your child?
I do not care to believe that the ending of this book was ambiguous. Lowen & Jeremy murdered Verity in cold blood. They pursued a love-bombing relationship void of any human connection because they were horny. There is nothing left in this book at its conclusion which would encourage one to believe that perhaps Verity was mentally ill. Even if she was, the way that this book writes about genuine struggles is absurdly insulting & undermines every single individual who experiences them firsthand.
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With the popularized case of Gypsy Blanchard & Munchausen Disease by Proxy, one might believe that much of what Verity detailed in her final letter regarding faking her brain damage & physical impairments were or could be believed. Unfortunately, people in a coma are not simply left to doze without medical equipment to monitor their brain waves or vital signals.
This is the final point on which I will touch in this review; timelines, believability & consistency were not present throughout this story. At one time, Lowen details herself as being 32, then on her birthday, she is turning 32. In Verity’s pretend journals, she tells Jeremy in the limousine that she is a writer & can therefore lie, to only tell the reader that she became a writer when Jeremy went to work. Et cetera…
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If there is anything that I choose to take away from this book it is that mental illness, physical illness & the overall general approach to these should be emphasized as important in our societies. I hope to see stories present authentic & valuable presentations of the lives & experiences of people whose decks hold these cards. I hope that we learn to grow collectively so as to render aid to invisible ailments something which might be easily attainable for all.
C. 💌