Zoe Whittall's No Credit River

Reviewed by Hannah Gardiner

(Book*hug, 2024)

​I was drawn to the bright pink cover: a glum girl in pink and red; indigo letters from the book’s title streaking down her face like textual tears. The title of this painting, Crying Girl No. 1 (with Intentional Bitch Face), by the anonymous artist Ambivalently Yours, overlays the book with a feminist irony: the banality of, the disdain for women’s negative emotions. Zoe Whittall’s No Credit River plays itself out on this edge.

A self-described autofictional work, No Credit River is the novelist and television writer’s first memoir. Though centred on the dissolution of Whittall’s long-term relationship with a trans man, the memoir stretches out over several years of her life, archiving heartbreak in different forms: the loss of a pregnancy and thus, for Whittall, of motherhood; the death of a friend; the loneliness of a pandemic; and the grief of examining the past in the middle of your life. The memoir takes the form of forty-eight prose vignettes—what Whittall calls poems—that allow her to present her memories to readers in a fashionable, fragmented manner.

In the opening vignette, titled “Ars Poetica / Poem in the Form of a Note Before Reading,” Whittall aligns herself with feminist and queer writers like Kathy Acker, Dodie Bellamy, Chloe Caldwell, and Sarah Manguso. Given the subject matter and genre of the work, it is no surprise that mentions of Maggie Nelson and her infamous autotheoretical book, The Argonauts, appear throughout the memoir. Both inspired by and seemingly self-conscious of her newfound genre and its imagined company, Whittall quips: “Is this book going to be me leaning into my Annie Ernaux era?” And despite Whittall’s courage of self-revelation throughout No Credit River, the answer to this exacting, if not self-ironic, question is, unfortunately, no.

It comes as no surprise anymore when the pervasiveness of being chronically online filters out in a text. But I am always surprised at how, despite the palpable angst of the digital world’s crisis of self-spectatorship, anything ‘online’ still presents itself as so deeply unserious. No Credit River is not shy about its online-ness, marking chapter titles with pop-psych buzzwords like “Red Flags” and “Securely Attached,” or bringing online-coded jokes onto its pages: “On Halloween you said, Let’s watch scary movies about snakes, or zombies, or intimacy.” Lines like, “I don’t like the wind, I say, as I make origami hearts on the living room carpet,” or “I go outside and pick five wildflowers and put them under my pillow because a woman on Instagram says it will make me dream about the person I’m going to marry. I have another nightmare about you. I wake to see the cat with a skeletal daisy in his mouth,” read as highly charged, tumblr-esque images meant to evoke an emotional response in readers that fall flat from their shallow symbolism. This kind of digital writing does not carry its own weight; you are meant to bring it with you.

This somewhat forced sentimentality meets an opposite, yet ineffectually complementary strategy at other parts in the book when Whittall presents heavy topics in an understated, almost apathetic way. It begins with short, flippant lines like, “When we know we should break up we get matching tattoos instead,” but builds throughout the book, through very real life difficulties, whose weight seems to have been taken out of them. A longer passage nearing the end of the book, after Whittall’s break-up and, later, a miscarriage, clearly shows how this plays out:

Today I text him happy birthday and he replies thanks with a heart emoji and I pull off the road to cry about how nice it was that he responded. Now I’m standing on the beach wishing I would have had a chance to know my baby. The poems I’d have read to her. Maybe she’d have learned to swim at this beach. The beach I’ve learned to be alone at.

There is an emotional ambivalence to the scene in its overlapping of joy and sorrow. However, the staccato shifts, present both in these lines and throughout the chapters, ultimately fail to build the emotional insight and relational tension that makes writing like Annie Ernaux’s or Maggie Nelson’s so affecting. A reader here has not been able to go on an emotional journey in this book; has not gotten to know anyone truly, to love them, and therefore to share in their grief.

This inherent sense of authorial detachment in No Credit River almost embodies the dynamic Whittall describes between her and her ex-partner: “we flit between detachment and the best sex of our lives.” But, as a reader, even this “best sex” is suspect in the context of a hyperbolic tendency throughout the memoir (e.g., “the queerest moment of our relationship”; “the most Toronto moment of my life”; “the most Canadian thing I’ve ever done”; “the best moment of my life”) that causes everything to feel over-exaggerated and therefore unreal. There is surely an art to evoking this kind of numbness—the feeling Whittall describes she felt after her break-up: “I don’t feel taken or haunted or otherworldly”—but it is endless in this work. And it is quite exhausting for writing to be so confessional yet so withholding, to have someone’s world laid out in front of you but to never be invited in.
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No Credit River is not served by this indifference, neither to its subject matter nor its genre. While I can overlook that the book at times makes light of ‘literature’ in lines like “A poem is four hundred years of lesbian gossip” or “Form is content, I tell the elk,” it is difficult to ignore the claims it makes about autofiction in its preface; that “Autofiction permits stories without villains. There is only a made-up recipe, mostly style and feelings […] Readers might say nothing happens as though it weren’t by design.” The more I reread the book, the more I felt that it was haunted by these early pronouncements within it, withdrawing accountability of its structure from the onset and proving its own claims untrue with time.
 
Although I can only imagine the difficulty endured when revisiting in language the trials of life that Whittall’s book recalls, I believe it is important to still be honest in the criticism of life writing about when things don’t work out, as they haven’t here.

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​Hannah Gardiner is a writer and cultural organizer from Kitchener, Ontario. She has a master’s degree in literary studies from the University of Waterloo, where she was thrice awarded the Beltz Essay Prize. Her writing and translation projects have been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, the Brubacher House Museum, and the Mennonite Historical Society of Ontario.