Let’s Get Into It! God Willing! A Review of Emma Newman-Holden’s It Feels So Good To Be A Victim – Andy Mallory

August 10, 2026

But I digress… So anyway, yeah. Let’s get into it! I first met Emma Newman-Holden on a balmy summer evening on the patio of my favorite local brewery. It’s funny, I was actually editing the final draft of another book review. I brought… Why is that funny? Because that’s what we’re doing now, right? I mean, you invited me here. No… My PR guy told me to restrain my “bluntness,” as he called it. A stupid word, but… Please, let me finish… No, you’re right. We started out on the wrong foot. Let’s try again…

So I brought Emma with me. She’s not into beer. In fact, I don’t recall her drinking anything at all. Super weird, right? But she was talkative. She had all these vivid stories… in one of them, God appears as a young black boy on a bicycle. Or maybe it was a tricycle… Anyway, our narrator pisses his pants while working at some high-class “event,” and everyone is embarrassed, and so he steps outside and God accidentally comforts him because the other boys at school call him “faggot”. The… No, no, God is the boy, and his classmates call him that. The whole thing reminded me… What? No, we don’t “know” that he’s God. We only know him as a boy on a bike. Or a trike. But that was the purpose of the character, to give the narrator a naked look at himself from outside himself. And isn’t that God’s job? Yet the whole thing felt purposefully flimsy, like the whole edifice of our social being is just made out of popsicle sticks or some shit. Like, however deep our desire for human connection might appear to ourselves, the hard realities of life constrain this depth, will always make these connections and our desire for them too shallow, too banal…

In another story, a middle-aged cam girl with double-digit viewership insists that “everyone is ugly.” Meanwhile, she pantomimes a kind of oedipal relationship between a high-paying viewer and his middle school theater teacher. He makes her pretend to be pregnant. I mean, he’s paying her a lot of money. She’s performing private cam shows for him because he pays her for them. He buys her a special sex toy called The Squirter. He wants her to squirt while she’s pregnant. And then he fucking… No, I mean he’s paying her bills. That’s what she says, at least. She tells us that because she’s the narrator. And he fucking leaks. He leaks her private cam videos. Isn’t that so fucked up? But listen… Yes, I might have had something to drink. But the narrator of the story wants human recognition. Don’t we all? She wants to say “I love you” to a human crowd that cheers in response. No, I mean when we were on the patio. She wants the crowd to cheer for her. It reminds me… No, the cam girl. The whole thing is about human connection. If you want to be pedantic you can talk about “political economy” or whatever. How we’re victims of historical circumstance. If you want to be real you can talk about how it’s human weakness. How… No, she’s strong. I’m talking about the circumstances that constrain her possibilities. She’s strong in spite of those circumstances. But the presentation of that strength is this weird, sickening display of self-flagellation. Really disturbing shit.

But anyway, she had all of these stories, and she told them with such… I don’t know? Panache? Enthusiasm? It seemed like her vivid storytelling was coming from a place of frantic obsession, but also ennui. And I mean, this seems obvious but, like, still weird to say? There was a jouissance to it. Like, she was furiously working toward some kind of small death. But the denouement, the payoff… I don’t know. It was unsettling. She finished with a story about rape. And this disturbed me at first. Why wouldn’t it? But then I thought about it, and… I mean, this is fucked up to say, but it was the only logical conclusion to the whole affair. I mean that. Seriously! Don’t “boo” me! Let me finish… Always returning to where we are… The whole thing was about rape, in a way. Because like, how many aspects of our lives are defined by decisions, not circumstances, but decisions, outside of our control? Decisions that others have made for us? Decisions made in the present, yes, but also long before we were born. And how little say do most of us have in the procession of worldly events after our deaths? I’d say “very little.” For most people, anyway. And that seemed to be what she was saying, too. I think that was the point of the pants-pissing cavalcade of obscenity. The fake pregnant squirting for money. The… No, the pregnancy was fake. So was the squirting. The indignity of everything. Maybe that was the point of it all. That if there is a God, then he loves that shit. That there is no dignity. That the edifice of our shared experience might as well be made out of popsicle sticks. That whatever forces in our lives exist to show us our nakedness to ourselves, also delight in this nakedness. And it reminded me… Yes, I’m talking about the storyteller. And so to surrender to that feeling, to surrender to that impotence… Doesn’t that feel, like, I don’t know, sort of liberating? To acknowledge one’s inextricable helplessness? I’m not saying that it’s right or true. I’m just saying that it’s what she was saying. I think.

So anyway, then she left. That’s it! Truly, she just got up and left. And then I told the bartender to “put everything on my tab.” She never ordered anything. It was so embarrassing. I… No, I mean my mandate to the bartender. But I digress… So anyway, yeah. Let’s get into it! The stories were great. They reminded me… They were… What? Why —

[the interview cuts off here]

 

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