“maybe it’s an algorithm. maybe it’s me.”
Dyscalculia by Camonghne Felix is 5.23 x 7.81 x 0.86 inches & 240 pages.
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I’m not sure I’ve ever read something that’s so ferocious and measured as Camonghne Felix’s Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation. Its themes include: big heartbreak, infidelity, skipping math class, Pythagoreanism (wild!), the failures of the mental health care, diagnosis and misdiagnosis, spirals and spiraling out.
It oscillates between flashes of quick, hard-earned wisdom like:
And then sweeping, messy, wordy bursting paragraphs that fill whole pages, devoted to capturing how it really felt, while also outlining how expression will always fall short.
Felix’s writing is most juicy when she’s in her verbose mode and most revelatory in the spare aesthetic. The pairing is achieves that formula of magic that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts.
A few weeks ago, I reviewed Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture about an economist in The Washington Post, and opened it with a line of dialogue from the novel: “You were born into an era of overload. Leaving things out is the great unmastered art form of your age.” I think about it all the time, of course, it seems very wise; and I kept thinking about it while reading Dyscalculia, which makes a slightly different point in an unexpectedly direct footnote:
This is one of Dyscalculia’s great points: what we’re tempted to leave out of the equation is actually the thing that lands us, as Felix puts it, in our epic miscalculation.