Ellen Miller and the Redemption of "Like Being Killed"
An Essay and an Interview with Alden Jones
*Note: scroll to the bottom of the essay to find a SoundCloud link to my audio interview with Alden Jones*
“Language, like other cognitive structures, is useful for some tasks and worthless for others,” Annie Dillard writes in Living by Fiction, the better—or best, depending on how you count—of her books about writing. “I cannot tell you, because I do not know, what my language prevents my knowing.” Dillard’s student, and the author of my favorite book, Ellen Miller, adds to this. Though language can prevent knowledge, it can also prevent loss. It can preserve an idea, or a sentiment, or a friend:
The effort to dig a mental crypt was futile, because the simple act of noticing her absence, of believing all memory of her dead and buried, of claiming not to miss her, was itself testimony to her lurking, living presence.
This passage occurs in the first scene of Miller’s first and only novel, Like Being Killed. The narrator and endlessly compelling main character, Ilyana Meyerovich, is in mourning, while at a party, over the loss of her friendship with the book’s other subject, Susannah, and also over the steadily approaching loss of her own life to the heroin, or “D,” as she calls it, she’s doing at this party. It’s a grim opening for a ruthlessly black and excoriating novel, but for also a funny and rhapsodic and hospitable novel. Though now grouped in with other drug books of the 90s, Like Being Killed transfigures its subject matter into a thorough and gorgeously written study of a character grappling with the intellectual and philosophical issues involved in her own mortality, her mutually abusive relationships with others around her, and her quest for salvation. It’s a wrongfully ignored book that should be reintroduced into the literary consciousness. What taints the novel’s reading experience, though, is the premature loss of its author in 2008.
Normally at this point in a review of a book, of course, I’d have a list of the author’s previous works and a bit about their career, but the career of Ellen Miller isn’t easy to follow. If you were to try to search for Ellen Miller, if somehow you knew to, the first person you’d get, after a few local listings, would be a person who represents or runs something called The Sunlight Foundation, the eerie euphemistic name of which (as if they were an organization designed to unearth dirt on rival high-end clients) leads you—or leads me, anyway—not to pursue it. And don’t. Don’t pursue it.
You might then find the author Ellen Miller, but not the right one. This wrong Ellen Miller is a self-described “working gal” who has published books with titles like The One Year Book of Inspiration for Girlfriends: Juggling Not-So-Perfect, Often-Crazy, but Gloriously Real Lives. If you’re intrigued by that title, by all means, go read her, but that’s not the Ellen we’re looking for. Don’t look on Wikipedia either. There you’ll find a bigger page for the character Ellen Miller on Lassie, played by two-time Emmy nominee Jan Clayton—which, you know, good for her. But you won’t find in any of these places the subject of this piece. To find our Ellen Miller, you have to already know whom you’re looking for.
I found her in the above video on YouTube in 2009. Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, was another hero of mine, so his opinion carried a lot of weight. If Handler had thought Miller was “the one to beat” as a young writer, I thought, then I really needed to check her out. I found Like Being Killed and ordered it. You should too, here. I took the book with me to my first semester away at college, and I ignored my classes for it. The long afternoons in the library, wearing a Girl Talk t-shirt and hiding from my Latin professor and reading Like Being Killed, felt like long and profound hours spent with my closest friend. These afternoons were the beginning of a lifelong search for who this character was, and who this author was, who could keep you such company.
According to what scant records we have, Miller was born in 1967 and spent her life in New York and various elite educational institutions. She attended Wesleyan, where she worked with Annie Dillard, then NYU for her MFA, and she got a MacDowell residency and taught at NYU and Pratt and the New School. She also attended various workshops around the city. (At 18, finding all this in my research on a library terminal in the middle of the country, I didn’t know any of these places, and the names would be tied with her in my mind. When a decade later I met a girl who went to the New School, I said aloud, “That’s where Ellen Miller went,” and the girl sort of cleared her throat politely.)
The impressions Miller made on those she encountered are definite and peculiar. In the sole profile of Miller, Marion Winik refers to her as “a sort of East Village Emily Dickinson” with “exophthalmic eyes.” (In my terminal, I searched eagerly for definitions of “exophthalmic.”) Miller’s teacher, the memoirist Dani Shapiro, remembers she chewed up the skin on her fingers “all the way from her nails to below her knuckles.” Handler’s memorial of her being “so smart and so quick and so honest and so much fun,” likewise, echoes throughout every tribute.
Part of what makes the search for testimony of Miller as a living writer so compelling is the absolute scarcity of information about her as such. What little there is about Miller is concerned with her death, perhaps because of the title and themes of her novel. But to find the information about Miller’s tragic and early death—that she died at 41, alone, and lost to many who knew her—often makes you feel creepy, like you shouldn’t know it or shouldn’t be seeing it, as with the paparazzi pictures of Thomas Pynchon on a walk with his son or the pictures of Robert Walser lying dead in the snow. Though Miller’s death is heartbreaking, it’s really not the part of her or her work to focus on. The central concern of Like Being Killed, the central compelling aspect for me as a green teenage reader (and as a less-green reader), is the way its writing and ideas are able to bring you a glimpse of death but rescue you at the last second, as it rescues its protagonist.
That’s all to say, the second reason searching for information about Ellen Miller is so compelling is that it’s so easy to confuse her with the novel’s central accomplishment: the character and voice of Ilyana Meyerovich. As harshly as it grates against literary propriety, the impulse to identify Miller her character—with their similar names, backgrounds, chewed fingers (attested to by multiple friends of Miller’s)—was so tempting that Miller herself addressed it in her interview with the Austin Chronicle:
Ilyana Meyerovich is a member of a group of addicts in New York’s Lower East Side who describes herself as the group’s “resident medical consultant,” so-called because of her Brown degree and because she can quote things like the Physician’s Desk Reference when needed. A major part of the appeal of Ilyana is her, and Miller’s, Wikipediacal breadth of references and abstruse knowledge. (If Ilyana’s like a Dostoevsky character dropped on the Lower East Side, likewise Miller, with her melancholic preoccupations and exhaustive intellectual and medical reading, is like Robert Burton dropped in Canarsie.) She applies this knowledge and exacting analytical mind to everything around her, giving an extensive taxonomy and history of bagels when asked to find some in her neighborhood, or giving the complete etymology of smack when she’s about to inject herself with some.
When giving a tour to prospective roommate Susannah Lyons, Ilyana lists off her books, her “beloved medical reference shelves” and her “favorite book, A Genetic Field Theory of Hemostasis and the Physiology of Blood Clotting” and even “an old doctoral dissertation I’d rescued from a Dumpster behind Brown’s science library.” When Susannah, later Susie, asks Ilyana how she has time to read all these books, Ilyana quips about her misanthropy, “‘Have you, by any chance, read No Exit?’” The joking reference makes clear Ilyana’s working philosophy: “Hell is other people.”
And in fact Ilyana’s relationships to others are primarily hellish exchanges of pain. Early on, Ilyana and her friend Margarita help carry Gerry, a fellow addict, around the city, failing to prevent his eventual overdose. Riffing on Primo Levi as she roams the city in the wake of his death, Ilyana thinks, “The world I chose to inhabit now had appropriated a history of suffering and slaughter that I despised strenuously but of which I had become an instrument.” Ilyana’s memories of her family are no less painful, her grandmother institutionalized in Bellevue, her parents remembered as a nauseous pair of gluttons, and her mother in particular a dark figure in Ilyana’s memory who recurs in a dream where she shoots at Ilyana (“My mother aims, this time at my head”). Woven throughout the book, additionally, is Ilyana’s sexually abusive relationship with a plumber who comes to snake her toilet, culminating in several visceral and disturbing scenes that made teenage me, alone in the library terminal, almost squirm out of my chair.
What positive relationships Ilyana forms are too frightening to save her. Susie turns out to be a central character in Ilyana’s quest after redemption, her chance for genuine connection and warmth. In the end, however, Ilyana isn’t ready to receive her redemption from Susie. Reflecting on the pain of accepting affection, a pain that later causes Ilyana to push Susie away, Ilyana considers that “Susie taught me that sometimes the having was worse than the wanting. She had shown me something, given me something, I would remember until the day I died.” Among the other redemptive or positive relationships in Ilyana’s life is with her cat Bummer, and even that pains her: “The cat’s affection—which was all the more profound because it had nothing to do with words—hurt.” The book is perhaps at its most haunting when Ilyana takes stock of the ominous and irreconcilable unknown continually lurking even in those she knows best. When remembering a childhood friend who moved away, and whose mother fed Ilyana the line that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet, Ilyana considers,
Only the obverse of her bromide about friendship held true. A friend was just a stranger one hadn’t yet met. A friend was nothing more than a stranger submerged—like an uncooperative vein, like a tire beneath a landfill, like a memory—rising up to the surface and only rarely beyond it.
It’s mostly through chance encounters with outright strangers that Ilyana can approach sincerity or redemption. When Ilyana, continually broke in the way of an addict, has run out of money and needs to buy her only food for a while, a man behind the counter discreetly comps her meal. The gesture breaks a damn in Ilyana and, delineated in Miller’s exhaustive and detailed prose and through Ilyana’s outsized emotions, produces Ilyana’s strongest reaction in the book as she bursts into tears. “I was no longer hungry,” she realizes. “I’d just had enough sustenance for a week.” Perhaps the novel’s most climactic scene of redemption occurs when Ilyana, having decided to kill herself, gets talked out of it by a transgender woman, a prostitute, who initially tries to rob her with a switchblade. “You’re not as smart as you think you are,” the woman tells Ilyana, “but you’re also not as fucked-up as you think you are.” Ilyana, evaluating her sources of salvation, states, “I could never predict what would ruin and what would redeem.”
Believing at all in this possibility of redemption, however, contributed to the book’s lukewarm reception. A Publisher’s Weekly review from the time called Like Being Killed “a ramshackle and sentimental novel.” The reviewer remained unconvinced by the book’s “redemptive machinery,” and sniffed at “the weak ending and an embarrassment of half-baked Big Themes.” Similarly, a pitifully short review in TheNew York Times pronounced that “Like Being Killed puts you in a drug user's head, but it doesn't give you enough reasons to want to stay there.” These should go down, like the famously tin-eared and midwitted contemporaneous reviews of The Changeling by Joy Williams or The Recognitions by William Gaddis, as a literary crime.
One can’t help but wonder what the reviewers meant by their statements. If even Ilyana’s redemption was “sentimental” (whatever that means) or too full of unearned emotional responses, then whose redemption was earned? If plunging your character into the depths of addiction, childhood abuse, adulthood abuse, loss of friendship, and the brink of suicide wasn’t enough to justify cutting them a break at the end, the reviewers must simply not have believed that redemption was possible or worth discussing. It’s the kind of cold literary cynicism that David Foster Wallace critiqued in Bret Easton Ellis’s work:
Miller’s novel tried desperately to apply this CPR to what she found worth saving in her character, to a disappointing response. “We all thought it was going to be this giant, impactful book,” says Miller’s former colleague the memoirist Alden Jones, in an interview I conducted with her that’s worth listening to below in its entirety. Jones attests to Ellen’s frustration with early readers finding her character irredeemable. The generosity that Miller’s book shows toward its character was dismissed and maligned, causing the book and its author to be forgotten. “The book kind of disappeared,” Jones says. “And then it was gone, and then she was gone.” Perhaps because of this response, Miller never wrote another novel, and she fell into obscurity, professionally and personally. Here the trail runs cold. Several of Miller’s colleagues lost touch with her. She died, as Handler and others attest to, undignified and alone.
Yet, if writing can accomplish anything, it’s to redeem someone from isolation. Language can prevent knowledge, as Annie Dillard observes, and Ellen Miller could not have known the isolation her language would prevent in her readers, the ways it would rescue me and others. In this way, Like Being Killed cannot be sentimental, since, as Norm MacDonald would have it, “if something is true, it cannot be sentimental.” This is what Like Being Killed did for me as a reader, and what it can do for Ellen and for future readers, to form them into a galvanizing chorus, as surrounds Ilyana at her ultimate, believable redemption:
All at once, without a conductor or a cue, everyone in the chorus started to sing simultaneously, the stories of their miraculous, sorry-ass, little lives. They oriented me—situated me, directed me as I walked east, toward the true relation or position. Constructed me, raised me—like a temple or house or barn built to face east. Like a tomb where the corpse’s feet point east. Like a church with its long axis spreading due east and west and its chancel at the eastern end. Like a worshipper kneeling toward Mecca and another reciting the creed, celebrating the Eucharist. I was aloft, airborne. Like a migratory bird against the vitelline sky—a homing pigeon—impelled by a native faculty to return eternally, to fly back toward an original place, after going or being taken to another place, distant from it.
Below, find my interview with Alden Jones, a friend of Ellen Miller, professor at Emerson College, and author most recently of The Wanting Was a Wilderness: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and the Art of Memoir. Thank you to Alden for her generosity and insight.
*I should also clarify that during the interview above, I misremembered the transgender woman in the book as a drag queen, and I forgot that Miller was in fact a contemporary of some Maximalist writers—William Vollmann strikes me as somewhat similar. If there are any other mistakes I’ve made, feel free to tell me (politely).*
An exceptionally well written piece. Butler-Gruett keeps to his form in seamlessly floating between commentary and exposition in a way that grips the reader and compels their heart to his end.