When the Sick Rule the World

Dodie Bellamy’s latest work, When the Sick Rule the World, is a series of biting, ouroboric takes on the bi-polar allure of sickness, a fantastic book of psychic bloodletting and cauterizing ironies.

‘Art writers lie. Art lies.’ Bellamy fishhooks these sentences into an essay that begins with an ingenuous art review, passes through cancer and the Rust Belt, ends with the dreams of a child. And each piece of writing in this book does something similar—whether it’s essay or narrative or both at the same time—which is to say that no two pieces are alike. Whether she writes about the death of her mother or Occupy Oakland, Kathy Acker’s Gaultier dress or ‘Techrification with Heart’ (in a letter to Twitter), Bellamy never fails to infect the holistic pieties of contemporary culture, to expose art’s enduring lies.

The beautiful thing about Bellamy and this book is how readily and insistently she gives herself over.

Bellamy’s infused wit is the lifeline that keeps the work buoyant, a line of resistance thrown out for the reader to grab and hold to. With its raw, sometimes crass observation juxtaposed with neurotic intellectual analysis, When the Sick Rule the World provides a peculiar brand of humor that is both a tool of self-examination and an exercise in revolt.

Dodie Bellamy is an American novelist, nonfiction author, journalist, and editor.

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