Sundress Reads: Review of Meta Work

Anastasia Wasko’s Meta Work (Planet Dust Enterprises, 2021) is a dissociative fever dream wearing the skin of creative nonfiction. The only question is: what type of creative nonfiction? 

A memoir, fittingly, places emphasis on memory. A personal essay explores a life lesson. More often than not, these lines become increasingly blurry as a writer searches for truth within the chaos of memory. Such was Wasko’s challenge writing Meta Work as a memoir, which couldn’t “hold [her] vision of [her] world” (5); wanting to preserve the fantastical, irrational elements of her life, Wasko turned to the genre of autofiction, in which the only promise is an authentic portrayal of herself. 

Through a blur of events and imagery, we readers are only offered one tangible detail: the chapter titles, denoting the location from which Wasko writes. The rest is up to her world of chaos, containing a mannequin with fiery, burning eyes; a river pooling at her ankles in the middle of Eighth Street; a depressed mother whose emotions swing like swords; a repressive father who refuses to consider writing as work; and, most importantly, unreliable time. Despite Meta Work being in chronological order, hours are missing from the story. Wasko’s time skips from 9AM to 5:45 (AM? PM?) to 9PM with no preamble, unobserved. She often breaks from her dazes to ask, “Where am I?” (Wasko 44). The gaping holes in her life are jarring to read, but these absences are intentional—we don’t know what happened, and neither does Wasko. This is, exactly, how she experiences day-to-day life. 

In fiction, as in trauma, there is truth in suffering. In order to simply live, Wasko must navigate an unyielding series of challenges. Existential dread and past trauma is compounded by the divorce of her parents, bipolar disorder, and a sense of insignificance—one she attempts to fight by working as a freelance marketing writer going in and out of the City. 

The City operates as a “mirror” (47) to portray Wasko’s internal chaos, but more specifically, a hatred; she despises her inability to reconcile her trauma and disorder with the rest of herself, and represses as a result. Primarily, this applies to her everyday emotions. After suffering a panic attack inside her office cubicle and being fired (banished) from the concrete jungle, Wasko finds dissociative comfort on the steps of Madison Square Garden. Later, though she swore she “would never come back to” Greenpoint as it “held too many memories” (25), she stays at an Airbnb there because it’s closer to her job. The City forces her to confront herself, and at every turn Wasko prefers to hide: sometimes even running back to her childhood home in Kingston to avoid looking into herself. 

This repression, naturally, inhibits her creativity. Writing is an expression of her chaos, and chaos is antithetical to being a functional member of society: therefore, throughout Meta Work, Wasko fails to write this very novel. We readers can see the way she’s holding back from herself. Wasko’s psyche and writing shine as a breathtaking whole during her worst moments of fear, exhaustion, and suicidal ideation, yet these are always short-cut. There is always work to do, rent to pay, and a need to keep moving; there’s no time for deep introspection nor emotion in Wasko’s life, only matter-of-fact compartmentalization, so there is none in her writing either. Wasko’s candor in refusing to fabricate what is missing, nor withhold from what is there, offers us a gut-wrenchingly authentic portrayal of what life is like as a flesh bag of trauma responses and unbalanced chemicals too busy surviving to heal. Imagery flits. Reality falls apart. Still, we know how Wasko feels about her absurd, confusing existence, and are helpless to watch her suffer.

Only after the death of her overworked father and the disabling of her mother due to electroconvulsive therapy does Wasko find her turmoil too heavy to ignore. Only then does she recognize, she must heal through expression. Through surrender to her inner self, engaging deeply and intimately with her desire to write, Wasko transcends her hatred of chaos—symbolized literally by the finishing of this book and the subsequent burning of a previous (failed) draft. She embraces the surreal nature of her life and revels in the blurred lines between fact and fiction, writing:

“I stood on the edge of the platform, and I vomited, and I cried, and I wretched, and I screamed, and I let go. I’m standing by myself at the track in the subway station at Grand Central, and this didn’t really happen, but it happened here on the page, and therefore it happened… It may not be factually true, but it is emotionally true. The experience of fiction and fact healed me.” (71) 

The final chapter skips several long years into the future, where Wasko has built herself a life wholly surrounded by writing.  She now “loves” (Wasko 81) the chaos, understanding that healing from it has served as a powerful driving force for her creativity. For, as Wasko writes in her introduction, “The truth is the chaos itself… This is meta-work” (5). 

Meta Work is available from Planet Dust Enterprises

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SINDUS Kim (any/all) is a writer & fan of the odd, off-putting, and preternatural. Though they have a penchant for fiction and CNF/essays, their Word document dedicated to bad poems about their ex-girlfriend well-exceeds fifty pages. You can find him at his completely empty Instagram and Twitter @sinducated, or her website, where she’s open to all kinds of small talk and inquiries.