Worry Doll by Laura McPhee-Browne review – a sensual, sinister novel about the horrors of desire

I’ve been craving a sandwich: soft white roll, roast chicken, sharp cheese. A bright little cut of tomato. After I finish this review I’ll walk up to the supermarket and buy myself a hot chook. Sink my teeth in.

It wasn’t my idea. I caught the craving from Laura McPhee-Browne’s Worry Doll. One of her characters longs for the same sandwich, made just so: “there is a particular amount of cheese and chicken that she requires for it to feel the way she needs it to when she chews and swallows.” I know that feeling. There is nothing cheap about cheap pleasure. And Worry Doll understands pleasure.

McPhee-Browne’s third novel is the tale of an affair told from both sides: two women – Heloise and Lacey – strangers on a train who tumble into something ferocious and all-consuming. Their accounts lie next to one another, as intimate and separate as twin hotel beds. We often get to play detective in these kinds of books, smug in the belief that we can see more, and further, than either lover (think Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies). They tempt us to believe that truth is knowable and blame can be apportioned – that the beds can be pushed back together.

Not here. We will always know less than the characters, never have the information we need. Worry Doll asks us to decide anyway, knowing our evidence is shonky and our hearts fickle. This is a novel for readers who love the interpretive gameplay of books like Audition by Katie Kitamura and Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday. The pleasure is speculation.

McPhee-Browne is interested in how desire makes honest liars of us: how two people can live through the same encounter and remember it entirely differently. Cruelly so. Dangerously so.

We meet Heloise first. She’s eight years into her relationship with Ernie and a few months into her affair with the decidedly unfrilly Lacey – an aloof gen Z. Heloise is deep in her 30s and her life seems to rest on bedrock: meaningful work, a “charming little house”, dinner-party friends, a prissy little cat, herbs in pots. And sweet, guileless Ernie. But press on any of it and it gives. She’s replaceable at work; Ernie’s folks own the apartment; even Pearl the cat needs fancy prescription food. And has Heloise really chosen any of it?

We watch as she pours herself into elaborate messages and declarations, and Lacey replies in crumbs: “This is their pattern – Heloise gives Lacey everything, Lacey gives Heloise something; she takes it, as if it is enough. Before she can stop herself, she sends Lacey back all her love, all the bulges inside her”.

Lacey feels like a grenade and Heloise has her teeth clamped around the pin. But it could be the other way around. Who has the power here? What even counts as power? Wanting or being wanted? Lacey has youth and energy. But Heloise has disposable income and the power of perspective: everything we know about Lacey is filtered through her. We won’t meet the younger woman until years later, when these febrile days are the stuff of memory.

For now, the only thing we know for certain is the force of Heloise’s desire. The way it inhabits her body. There’s a reason the language of lust is entwined with the language of fever. This is delirium. Consumption. Seethe and fester. Heloise starts losing things: a credit card, her handbag, groceries. Is this the onset of something sinister, or is she simply in thrall? What’s the difference?

My tolerance for twee is low and precious Heloise tests my limits. Her elaborate self-pity; her elaborate self-care. Her self-cut fringe. The way she names the swans on her bathroom tiles: “Philomena, Featherpuss, Gwenny.” Thank goodness for rapacious Lacey, who takes over the novel halfway and upends everything we think we know. Goodbye lavender soaps; hello carnal mess.

The pieces are in place for a psychosexual cat-and-mouse game. But who is the mouse? (“She wonders if she is a sociopath,” Heloise asks herself, “if Lacey is one, too.”)

Worry Doll is balanced at that suppurating seam where the grotesque meets the erotic. This is a novel of the body and its thresholds. The body that leaks, ejects, hungers, aches, stinks and spasms. The body that rots. McPhee-Browne refuses to tidy food and sex away from piss and menstrual blood. The mouth is for kissing, but also for chewing and vomiting and gulping wine. We lick lovers. We lick plates. We gnaw on bones. We strap on options. She grants everything the same (in)dignity; the same sensual weight.

But for all its menace and squelch, Worry Doll is a novel about the ordinary business of having a body. Sometimes the most unsettling horrors are the ones we invent to make our obsessions – our appetites – feel reciprocal.

Desire wrenches Heloise into her body, and it is impossible to read this book without becoming aware of your own and what it wants. Between a cerebral day job and chronic pain, I often forget about mine, or try to. I tend to treat it like a transportation system for my brain. Worry Doll returned me to the meat of it – the gurgle and lurch. I read the book over one insomniac night and, in the morning, I woke up hungry.