natasharubyart

I was nervous before this interview. Natasha Helfer’s work sits right at the intersection of so much of what I write about in Latter-day Psychosis: religion, sexuality, shame, mental health, and learning to trust yourself again. It felt aligned. We talked about growing up Mormon and being afraid of my own body. I told her about the purity lesson that has stayed with me for more than twenty years: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich passed around a room full of teenage girls until it was...

I spent years writing a book about my life. Thousands of words of memory, dug up and arranged and revised until I could recite whole scenes from it. I still could not read some of it without my body reacting. That is why I started EMDR. And once I did, my brain began handing me things I had not thought about in decades. I came to it after a long stretch with a therapist I could not connect with. She canceled about as often as we met, and when we did meet, she often let me out fifteen or...

It has been a couple of weeks since I wrote here. Life has been full in mostly good ways: painting, working, preparing for some travel, navigating oil changes and tire crises, and slowly shifting from the enormous task of writing a book to the entirely different one of bringing it into the world. So, an actual update: Latter-day Psychosis is planned for release on November 17, 2026. Even typing that feels strange. For years, this book existed as fragments. Memories, old journal entries,...