DYSCALCULIA

A poet’s tale of heartbreak applies dyscalculia’s meaning literally as well as metaphorically in order to understand a pattern of relationships.

In this debut memoir, Felix opens with the discovery that her boyfriend, referred to as X, is cheating on her. Her initial indignation (“I wanted him to be sorry”) gave way to begging, which landed her on the floor: “I crumble into fetal.” Here, the author casts back to episodes of childhood trauma and untreated mental illness. In math, unlike relationships, “input begets output….You give what you get. You get what you are prepared to receive.” Felix divides the book into three sections (“Fractals,” “To Square,” and “The Final Value”); use of the present tense in the first two heightens their urgency. “Fractals” details the scars she bears from her fractured upbringing; “To Square” accounts for the pain borne out of her split with X, which relates to the former. “In some spirals, there is momentum and force, in others, just patterns,” she writes. “Maybe it’s an algorithm. Maybe it’s me.” Post-breakup, Felix returned to her adolescent habit of cutting herself. The final third unfolds in the past tense as the author reckons with lifelong pain. “Black girls get to write about benign heartbreak too,” she writes. Proud and saccharine and pathetic. When you’re healed you tell the story differently.” The text is rendered in a millennial voice, evidenced, for instance, in the author’s description of herself (“Capricorn Sun, Gemini rising, Taurus Moon, Sagittarius Venus, INFP, Year of the Monkey”), and, while it may appeal mostly to 20- and 30-somethings, much of Felix’s prose, like her poetry, is carved out of granite. The only footnote ends, “What I don’t say in a project about truth is what gets in the way.”

A wildly smart, singular redemption story that is greater than the sum of its parts.