My Experiments with Truth (working title; after the Gandhi text) is a literary memoir by Bethany Reivich, an American social psychologist, 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 the muck 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 afraid to consummate due to his micropenis, to working as a luxury escort in Barcelona, Bethany remains committed to experience as method. The narration begins in Barcelona, where a nearly hallucinatory intellectual affair with the White Duke himself, a poetry-loving, proto-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.

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A rotating cast appears: a nationalist politician, a submissive football star, 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.

 

Sensuous, precise prose gives way to comedy, meditations on language and commodified intimacy, anthropological absurdity, erotic farce, and social violence, often colliding within single scenes. The structure holds together musically and kinetically rather than through conventional narrative anchoring, with motifs recurring across continents and decades. 

 

Where most memoirs neatly package trauma for consumption, My Experiments refuses easy digestion.  On the surface, the book remains strangely readable, funny, and intimate, but its shifting tonal logic gradually destabilises ordinary habits of perception, leaving the reader unsure where sincerity ends and symbolic collapse begins.

 

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 search for forms of perception and relation capable of surviving the collapse of inherited meaning.

Comparable Works

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard – My Struggle

This book shares Knausgaard’s rawness, philosophical intensity, and grandiose title appropriation, but where he tries to hold life in place through obsessive detail, detail here behaves as numinous, kaleidoscopically organising musical motifs, rather than serving the canonical impulse to concretise the self.

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Carmen Maria Machado – In the Dream House

Like Machado’s, this book uses fragments and shifting perspectives to explore the effects of psychic rupture—but with fewer frames, and more immediacy.

 

Doireann Ní Ghríofa – A Ghost in the Throat

Ní Ghríofa traces a woman’s voice through time and silence; this book stays inside that silence, letting the feminine voice speak through breakdown and transformation.

 

Bhanu Kapil – Incubation: A Space for Monsters

Like Kapil’s work, this book refuses fixed identity or genre, writing from the edge of form to expose what language usually hides—what it means to be unformed, in motion, and still speaking.

 

Ariana Reines – Mercury

Reines writes with visceral urgency, tracing pain through language and cosmology. This book shares her intensity and spiritual stakes, but does not ask her audience for containment or symbolic recognition. Where Reines moves through disintegration with alchemical flair, this work writes from the other side of collapse—where rhythm, not rhetoric, holds the field together.

 

Anne Carson – Autobiography of Red

Carson’s book merges myth and desire with philosophical weight. This book carries that intensity, but doesn’t use myth as solid scaffolding. Instead, it writes from the collapse of symbolic structure

 

*****

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