The Fuccboi Keeps the Score
Martyn Reyes on Sean Thor Conroe
‘The skin ego is the interface between psyche and body, self and others’
—Jay Prosser, ‘Skin Memories’ (Thinking Through the Skin, eds. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Bailey)
On a winter’s day last December, I bought Sean Thor Conroe’s novel Fuccboi in one of the few English-language bookshops in Madrid, where I had just moved to from Sydney. At the time, I was experiencing yet another eczema flare, although I was becoming much better equipped in understanding how to treat it. Even though the dry air of the city worsened the state of my skin, the surrounding cold meant I could hide under layers of clothing. As I avoided eye contact and spoke to the salesperson in broken Spanish, I hoped she would not notice my face. At least, I didn’t want to notice her noticing. While she was busy placing my purchases in a brown paper bag I quickly brushed the flakes off my shoulders.
After reading Fuccboi I came to the realisation that there are two parallel plots. The first is straightforward. Set in Philadelphia a year into Donald Trump's presidency, Conroe’s protagonist—named Sean, and who is largely based on Conroe himself—tries to get his shit together after failing to reconcile a relationship with someone he describes as his ‘ex bae’. Along the way, Sean questions his life choices and misgivings towards late capitalism, ultimately examining what it means to be a man in this day and age.
The second plot is less examined, barely mentioned in any marketing material or reviews since the book’s publication in early 2022. Throughout the novel we follow Sean as he suffers and deals with severe full-body eczema, which leads to infection and several hospitalisations. He itches and scratches and flakes and oozes while simultaneously attempting to write a book, connect with his family and confront his ex-bae’s new partner, all in the name of self-improvement. As the novel progresses we see that his physical being is often triggered by his emotional states and vice versa. In this light, the state of his skin could be seen as a mirror to his psyche, a portal to the unconscious.
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In the latter half of 2020 I found myself beginning to write a personal essay about my skin. My eczema, which is also severe and full-body, was again flaring up at the time, enveloping my being both physically and cognitively. I was trying to think through the relationship—if there was any—between the condition of my skin and the colour of it, and if race plays a part in my skin’s suffering or healing. I wrote:
While atopic dermatitis acted as a vehicle for self-hatred and a severe lack of confidence, my brown skin was a freight train carrying explosives crashing in the same direction.
Coupled with this already complex idea was the impact of my emotional state and personal flaws, which was compounded by the latent trauma that came with growing up as a person of colour in so-called Australia. Through my research I came upon Prosser’s essay in an anthology titled Thinking Through the Skin, holding on to what he articulates, that ‘we become aware of skin as a visible surface through memory, and that skin remembers, both literally in its material surface and metaphorically in the signification given to the surface’. This skin memory touches on French psychoanalyst Dider Anzieu’s idea of the ‘skin ego’ where one’s skin is the ‘projection of the psychic on the surface of the body’.
For months after, my essay was drafted, redrafted, workshopped and re-workshopped, yet I continued feeling that it lacked resolve. Something seemed missing. Every conclusion I wrote towards felt inconclusive. I ended up abandoning the essay, retrospectively shuddering at its overtly confessional nature—riddled with clichés that involved the retelling of racial abuse and the regrettable glorification of whiteness. Even though I no longer think about my racial identity through negation, the central question stayed with me: What does my skin remember, reimagine, reappropriate?
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In John Updike’s memoir Self-Consciousness (1989), he dedicates a chapter to his experience with psoriasis. In it he writes about the guilt he faced after leaving his wife, questioning whether it had triggered the metabolic riot he experienced in the aftermath of their separation: ‘[...] my skin attacked me—my face broke out, my shoulders and neck became so encrusted I couldn’t turn my head without pain.’ Prior to the memoir’s publication, in a short story for the New Yorker titled ‘From the Journal of a Leper’ (1976), about an unnamed ceramicist who seeks a cure for his psoriasis, Updike wrote, ‘This skin is me, I can’t get out.’ This claustrophobic anxiety is echoed in the following passage from Fuccboi as an inescapable cycle of degeneration:
[...] all the old skin would shed, then I’d have this new layer, but the new layer was never really ready to face the day; it would be, for some days, but then it’d be so sensitive, so thin, the slightest scratching would slightly irritate it, slightly disrupt its surface; this wasn’t a biggie till it wouldn’t follow through, wouldn’t commit to regenerating.
Would jump ship last minute and start shedding again.
Abort the mission and flake to the floor.
Like Updike’s anonymous character, the reader may deduce that for Conroe’s protagonist, the act of shedding old skin becomes the shedding of the old self, and therefore the new layer represents a new self. Yet, unlike what typical metaphors surrounding rebirth or metamorphosis would suggest, this new self is fragile, uncommitted, self-sabotaging—it rejects the possibility of renewal and reconciliation, ultimately flaking to the floor as dead cells. What further demonstrates this parallel between skin and self, the materialisation of emotional upheavals onto the body, is Conroe’s deliberate linking between the first word of the last sentence—‘abort’—and the next paragraph: ‘If somehow still unclear: ex bae’s abortion was what fucked everything.’
As Sean tries anything and everything to cure his eczema—medicinal weed, steroids, a Tibetan doctor, an extensively rigid anti-inflammatory diet, anti-histamines, bleach baths, celery juice and so on—he begins to arrive at the conclusion that whatever he was ‘dealing with skin-wise might require a deeper sort of treatment.’ Near the end of the book, almost a year since he first had to be hospitalised for a skin infection, Sean converses with T, ‘ex-roomie bae’s boo’ and a psychologist in training, about how cortisol regulation and trauma management are connected. T suggests that all the ‘shame and self-hate and repression’ Sean feels is linked to how much his ‘bod had wilded out’. T continues to explain how unaddressed traumas can worsen inflammatory disorders. ‘Goddamn bro. Too fkn relevant. I can’t even,’ Sean replies. When he asks what he should do, T says: ‘The only thing to do! Start addressing that shit. Forgiving yourself. Letting go. You call that therapist like I told you to?’
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In one of Conroe’s many stream-of-consciousness musings in Fuccboi, Sean ruminates on the act of writing as an attempt to express the inexpressible. He wonders if writing is one way to tackle repression, taboo, shame, and what he calls ‘unspeakable traumas’—and how ultimately one’s inability to do so might result in grave bodily consequences:
Bc the body knows, bro.
The body will feel what you decide, mentally, you’re not gonna.
The body will say what you won’t.
And when the thing you won’t say/write ain’t pretty, best believe how your body lashes out won’t be either—
Here I think back to Prosser’s essay, where he suggests that uncontrollable skin disorders signal a return of a repressed event, possibly something from a childhood memory or unconscious fantasy. What isn’t Conroe’s protagonist saying or writing? What shameful thoughts, taboo impulses or unspeakable traumas is Sean unable to express that would lead his body to undergo such a state of disarray and deterioration? As Hanson O’Haver concludes in his review of Fuccboi, the audience is made aware, vaguely, of significant emotional hurdles such as the above-mentioned abortion, Sean’s strained relationship with his father, his parents’ divorce, and a novel-in-progress that someone he refers to as ‘editor bae’ refused to continue working on. O’Haver critiques Fuccboi as ‘failing to mine the heavy stuff to the same depth as the ordinary’. It’s an understandable argument: readers are forced to read pages of pointless rambling and waffling, so they should be rewarded with the juicy details of his trauma. Yet it’s possible that Sean the protagonist—and thus Sean the author—simply could not find ways to express the trauma. They are ‘unspeakable’, after all; perhaps readers have to pay closer attention to the way Conroe writes about Sean’s body to better grasp what is left unsaid.
The abject language that Conroe uses in Fuccboi reflects the horror that Sean’s ego has to face, creating images of a nauseating reality. It is a kind of body horror. At various points in the novel Conroe describes Sean’s skin as ‘raw’, ‘cracked’, ‘putrid’, ‘dead’, ‘roid-weakened’, ‘rotten-smelling’, ‘weird’, ‘flared’, ‘infected’, ‘inflamed’ and ‘gooped’, subject to ‘popping’, ‘chafing’, ‘putrefying’, ‘oozing’, ‘leaking’, ‘sweating’, ‘spraying’, ‘digging’, ‘dangling’, ‘leaking’, ‘wilding’, ‘dying’, ‘shedding’ and ‘flaking’. When Sean draws similarities between himself and the non-human, such as elephants, snakes, reptiles and lobsters, he is deliberately creating distance and alienating himself from humanity. Later, when he calls himself ‘a rare eczema leper’, he asserts himself as Other, which points to how he interprets his positionality in the world. While Conroe’s sparse, staccato writing style—heavy with line-breaks and internet speak—can be interpreted as a reflection of his mind, one that is unsettled, unfiltered, and fueled by numerous stimulants, so too can it be interpreted as an image of his skin. For eczema sufferers, the experience of a full-body itch and the masturbatory act of scratching yourself, is restless, seldom still.
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In my unfinished essay, I wrote briefly about working in a customer-facing role, where over the course of my employment I was likened to a monster due to my unsightly skin. There were times where I was also forced to hide in the staff room because of the colour of my skin, the reason given to me being that a customer was known to abuse Asian staff. The emotional scars of these experiences completes the triangulation of ideas central to that essay. In the midst of writing it, I encountered the work of Australian writers Carly Findlay and Maxine Beneba Clarke, who similarly explore the intersecting experiences of race, skin colour and disability.
In ‘Complex Colour’, Findlay’s contribution to the Growing Up African in Australia anthology, she writes about her experience of being mixed-race, though not presenting as such due to the red colour of her skin, a symptom from a condition called ichthyosis. She explores belonging and unbelonging in the context of various marginalised communities and the resultant confusion surrounding her identity. Her essay moves through her slow process of self-acceptance, the increasing ease at which she feels more comfortable seeing and claiming herself both as ‘Carly with red skin’ and a person of colour. Similarly, in Clarke’s memoir The Hate Race, she recounts being diagnosed with vitiligo as a child, a condition where pigment-producing cells stop functioning, resulting in white patches on the body. However, Clarke mistakes the skin disorder as God answering her wish to be white ‘like everyone else’, believing that the lighter patches on her face would turn pink and spread to the rest of her body eventually leaving her completely white, ‘free from golliwog jokes, “bad” hair and [her] untuckable bottom’. But the white spots on her body gradually return to their natural pigment, leaving her disappointed as she is forced to come to terms with the unchangeable reality of Blackness. Clarke’s skin issues continue throughout the memoir as she details her experience with keloid scars and a skin picking habit. Towards the end of the book, she begins to realise that her skin issues were physical manifestations of the trauma she faced in her school years.
Race is also brought up at various points in Fuccboi. Early in the novel, Conroe’s protagonist reveals that he was born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and white American father, and lived there until he was five. His white grandfather was a U.S. Air Force pilot, while his Japanese grandfather’s entire family was killed by bombs dropped by U.S. planes during World War II. These complex familial webs are briefly touched on, such as during a scene where Sean is high at a party talking to another Asian-American man. As they clink their sake-filled shot glasses to their ‘respective Asian brethren’ and for ‘holding down their respective motherlands’ their conversation abruptly ends, as Sean is pulled away to do more drugs. Later, Sean reveals to the reader that he had intentions to confide to the man at the party:
But what I realised was, for however much I want to rep the motherland, be bitter towards America for merking 1/20 of Japan’s population, I actually know next to nothing about Japan.
Even though Sean insists he doesn’t have enough knowledge to claim his motherland and has his Asianness routinely dismissed by others, he simultaneously tries to grasp at what little he knows, invoking references mostly picked up online or from his mother surrounding Japanese culture, history and art. Generally however, Conroe does not make race a focal point when it comes to his protagonist’s characterisation or the actual plot; when it is mentioned, race is not associated with feelings of repression or confusion. Instead, it opens up a wider conversation involving cultural, psychical and genetic inheritances.
Three quarters into the novel, we learn that Sean and his uncle from his mother’s side of the family suffers from the same skin condition. Uncle N, as he is named in the book, lives in Tokyo with Sean’s grandmother, his Baba, and is unmarried and childless. He and Sean’s mum don’t have a relationship, for reasons unbeknownst to Sean as his mother refuses to talk about it. It becomes clear that this avoidance runs in the family. We learn that Baba and Uncle N don’t like to ‘admit anything is wrong’, a cultural attribute rationalised by Sean’s mother as being inherently Japanese: ‘put your head down, erase your feelings, and keep pushing to the bitter end.’ Sean has not only inherited the genetic disposition of disordered skin, but silence and suppression as well. I think of Prosser’s essay again, which notes that ‘hereditary skin disorders explicitly tie skin stigmatisation to family memory’. It is here that I wonder: who knows what unaddressed conflicts and traumas have been passed down over generations, each inheritance memorialised onto one’s skin? Unlike emotion, an itch can hardly ever be ignored.
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Conroe’s protagonist is a highly unreliable narrator. He admits to this. He is often unclear and forgetful (‘Honestly can’t remember whether they were or weren’t’), sometimes reappropriating memories into different settings or circumstances (‘I called my ole man later that day. Actually I didn’t [...] Or maybe I did. Let’s say I did.’). Readers are posed with the challenge of whether to trust him or not. This unreliability is further highlighted in his many contradictions and hypocrisies, all of which reinforce his uncertainties and the novel’s ambiguity. He is unable to pick sides and has a fickle nature, particularly as he treads the tightrope between being outwardly perceived as either men’s rights activist or woke lit-bro through his actions and decisions. Again, this facet of Sean’s psyche functions similarly to his skin—like him, much of what the skin remembers is unreliable and fantastical. As Prosser writes, ‘skin’s memory is as much fabrication of what didn’t happen as a record of what did, as much fiction as fact.’ People with eczema have immune cells that are overactive. Even if there is no threat to the body, these cells stay alert and paranoid. As a result the inflammatory process is unrelenting. The cells continue to be threatened by the imaginary. For eczema sufferers, a sense of unreliability is in-built. We cannot stop living the fiction.
Even as I write this review-essay, I am stressed and distracted—my focus is regularly broken by the need to scratch my scalp, the back of my neck or my arm. I cannot tell whether my keyboard is dirtied with flecks of dust or my dead skin cells. Yet, like Sean the author and Sean the protagonist, like John Updike, my skin is inescapable. Each of us is similarly obsessed with our skin, and how they intersect with our memories and failings. When we write confessionally, we attempt to understand the layers of guilt and shame that stem from disorder, and whether this disorder is perceived by ourselves or outsiders, often both. Perhaps as Updike suggests in his memoir, our strengths are linked to our ailments: ‘Might it not be the horrible badge of whatever in me was worth honoring: the price, high but not impossibly so, I must pay for being me?’
I realise now that the task of uncovering what my skin remembers, reimagines or reappropriates was made impossible not due to my own shortcomings. But it is also not because of an inability to commit to scrutinising my own guilt and shame. No: the task was made impossible because the memories and imaginings surrounding my skin simply could not be uncovered. The lesions of Sean’s skin and my skin are the markings of the unconscious. Our skin act as sites and satellites for unspoken and internalised truths. It is a wordless phenomenon of mystery—one that cannot be as easily read and dissected as a book, because what is held and stored within our dysfunctional cells contain the unknown and inexpressible. There is never any real relief in the itch-scratch cycle. Even if our skin is no longer visibly flared, swollen or red, inflammation always lingers beneath the surface.
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Martyn Reyes is a writer and artist from Sydney. His work can be found in the Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings, Debris Magazine, Liminal and more. He is currently working on his first book-length project.