It’s an enormous tribute to Sara Benincasa as a writer and a comedian that there is anything at all to laugh at in her memoir Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. Any thought that this will be a light-hearted romp through some minor neuroses is dashed on page two in an Introduction in which Benincasa recounts the truly horrific suicide of a high-school classmate. He was a seemingly perfect kid and no one saw it coming, least of all Benincasa.
It’s an ideal place to start her story, a tale of coming of age and conquering fear. It foreshadows the seriousness of Benincasa’s impending agoraphobia and highlights her outsider status. She would have difficulty coming to terms with both afflictions as she worked her way through different colleges and career paths. But to find her place, she had to first be willing to leave her bed.
Benincasa provides an inventory of her fears right up front in list form, including the severity, whether or not she is currently over it and what the solution was. She has overcome her fear of having a wet head, for example, and did this by “Avoiding the shower; using a high-power hair dryer with a diffuser for less frizz and extra curls.” She is mostly over her fear of leaving the house, thanks to Prozac, Xanax, Klonopin, therapy and a stuffed giraffe that accompanies her everywhere. She is not yet over her fear of God but is working on it by “Consorting with atheists and other hell-bound types, like comedians.”
Benincasa writes about debilitating panic attacks and how, when she should have been having the time of her life in college, she decided she was an incurable freak, “designed not to be displayed and celebrated but to be hidden in the darkness, an ugly, stinking waste of flesh.” The first big warning sign came during her senior year of high school and a class trip to Sicily, when she had a panic attack and was rushed to the nearest hospital. This was partially brought on by the mean, popular girls who tortured her, and whom Benincasa skewers here. But she gets to meet “Dr. Sophia Loren” and her bevy of hot assistants in the socialist hospital, is given drugs that make it fun to linger on consonants at the end of phrases, and all returns to normal.
The normality doesn’t last. In college at Emerson, she becomes afraid to leave her apartment. Then she becomes afraid to use her bathroom, and then to leave her bed. She stops eating, because eating leads to energy and energy to wanting to do things, which might lead to leaving her apartment. She uses cereal bowls for a toilet, hiding them under her bed and in her closet. She expects to die, even hopes for it. Thanks to friends, Benincasa is forced to leave the apartment, and she returns home to New Jersey for therapy.
The word “journey” is overused these days. It’s applied to contestants who have spent three weeks on The Bachelor and to just about anyone who is not dead (and some who are) to describe how they attained their current status. But what Benincasa goes through in Agorafabulous! can fairly be described as a journey worthy of Ulysses. It takes her from Jersey to Boston to Texas to New York, from peeing in bowls in her apartment to performing stand-up comedy in front of hundreds of people at a time. Along the way she faces a rabid Santa Claus doppelganger outside a Planned Parenthood, the deranged leader of a retreat in Pennsylvania and catty high schoolers, and finds friends who act as guardian angels.
Somewhere on that path, Benincasa became extremely self-aware and began writing about her neuroses and character flaws with impressive clarity and humor. There are no gags in this book. The humor flows from the details, tragic as they sometimes are. The single thing that would calm Benincasa when she had her college attack was listening to the Dave Matthews Band’s “Satellite” on a constant loop, which was fine when she was alone, but less so when her mother was driving her home. Later, sitting despondent in a hospital after a break-up, Benincasa realizes she’s not crazy, just broken-hearted, and is able to lift her spirits with chicken soup and Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run.”
The ultimate epiphany comes in the form of stand-up comedy. Benincasa thinks she has finally achieved her dream when she enters teaching college at Columbia, but on the suggestion of a classmate finds her true calling making people laugh. In a refreshing twist, comedy is the final step toward sanity. It gives Benincasa’s life direction and purpose and helps her feel whole. Agorafabulous! is proof she has found her place.
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