Neil Vickers discusses poet and academic Lucy Newlyn’s debut novel The Forum.
One of my favourite books is the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956). In it, Goffman argues that when we find ourselves in face-to-face encounters we play out roles. The waiter in a Shetlands hotel will compliment his guests on their menu choices and then jeer them to his colleagues in the kitchen. In each setting (the restaurant, the kitchen) he finds himself playing a different part. He is like an actor wandering from play to play. Each setting was governed by its own distinct set of rules or, to use Goffman’s technical language, each constituted a distinct ‘interaction order’. Goffman believed ‘interactants’ scrutinized one another intensely to ensure the rules were being followed. Cheats were liable to be expelled and stigmatized.
I have long wondered how this theory would play out in the online world. An answer of sorts is offered in Lucy Newlyn’s riveting new novel, The Forum, almost all of which takes the form of a transcript of a social media page run by and for people with Bipolar Affective Disorder (BAD). Newlyn herself is bipolar and has written movingly about her struggles in a memoir, Diary of a Bipolar Explorer (2018). She has long experience of bipolar message boards and other internet fora (for many years she ran a creative writing forum online). She will also be known to some readers as one of the world’s most distinguished scholars of English Romanticism.
The Forum is her first novel and all its comedy and pathos stem from the peculiarities of BAD. Moderated by two school teachers, Margaret and Brian, one approaching retirement, the other ‘off sick,’ the stated goal of the site is to allow people with BAD to seek and offer help with whatever they are going through. Here is a page bringing together people who often have nothing in common with one another other than their diagnosis. They exhibit all the comorbidities of their condition – addictions of various sorts, paranoia – and all the social humiliations that are routinely visited on its sufferers: having to mask one’s condition at work, unemployment when you can’t, being sectioned, having children taken away by Social Services, homelessness, mystification on the part of family and friends… All these find their way into The Forum. Contributors regularly decide that some new member is a spy sent from Social Services or some other hostile agent. ‘They haven’t really suffered’ is the gist of the complaint made by the site users. When Ricky, a taxi driver, mentions his use of recreational drugs, or when Sue, a hairdresser, describes an evening in which she ended up having sex with three men, pile-ons ensue. Newlyn does not flinch from showing us a cruel pack-mentality overtaking some members’ judgment, but she also seems to imply that such outbursts are transient, and do not amount to a permanent ‘turning’ against a particular person. Each episode of flaming ends with the same crisp statement: ‘A moderator has closed off comments on this thread’ (Newyln, p. 117).
One of the funniest features of the novel is that most of its characters write carelessly. Their grocers’ apostrophes, misspellings and other solecisms level the group down so that the apparently ‘better spoken’ characters like Margaret and Brian have no special authority (‘who the fuck dyou think you are Brian, always sticking your nose into other ppls business? Sometimes think you fancy yourself as Jeremy Kyle lol’ Newlyn, p. 256).
The Forum is a novel, not a transcript and the attentive reader soon becomes aware that its characters hold secrets. It emerges that some characters are personally known to one another outside the forum but the knowledge they think they hold turns out to be at odds with what other characters know or believe. The main source of the novel’s drama is a decision by Stephen and Lily, two of its younger members, to try to make a documentary about living with BAD. Some members enthuse about this plan while others see it as a self-aggrandizing project that will force participants to out themselves to employers, their children and various figures in officialdom. Lily visits many forum members in order to get footage that can be pitched to a television production company. But the documentary is overshadowed by a tragedy few if any readers will have anticipated. This event inspires 42 members of the forum to leave it permanently but those who remain meet and begin an email correspondence. The language of the novel changes completely in the closing section when the characters let their guard down a bit more. Even the appalling spelling may be a mode of disguised self-presentation.
The Forum documents the splendours and miseries of internet message-board communications better than any other novel I’ve read. A tremendous amount of collective knowledge and wisdom about BAD is argued over and shared in its pages. The kindness and solidarity Newlyn describes are often literally lifesaving. And even at its worst, its cruelties, she suggests, pale into insignificance compared with everything else bipolar people have to contend with. The tragedy of online life – or at least this version of it – is that it does not enable individuals to overcome enough of their isolation and lacks the consolations of the face-to-face domain that a handful of characters of The Forum eventually create for each other in real life.
About the Author:
Neil Vickers is Professor of English Literature and the Health Humanities at King’s College London. His most recent book is Being Ill: On Sickness, Care and Abandonment (London: Reaktion Books, 2024). He has just published two long articles on the origins of the narrative-based medical humanities 1980-95 and a comparative history of the medical humanities in France and the USA. He is currently writing what he hopes will be the first book-length history of the medical humanities.
References:
Goffman, Irving (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956).
Newlyn, Lucy (2018). Diary of a Bipolar Explorer. Signal Books.
Newlyn, Lucy (2025). The Forum. Self-published using Amazon Publishing.
