Merely writing a book called A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours & Mine) is bound to result in infinite opportunities for Patricia Pearson to hear about everyone else’s, whether she likes it or not. For now, she figures she can handle it, maybe  — a welcome distraction from writing about herself, whether as a fictional alter ego in novels Playing House and Believe Me, which followed the first-person columns written for the National Post, later anthologized in Area Woman Blows Gasket.

When she gave up that gig five years ago, it wasn’t without high drama, as Pearson’s sign-off was published instead in The Globe and Mail. The breaking point came with the National Post’s cheerleading for regime change in Iraq, and chastising Canadians for not being hawkish. Her feelings have been vindicated, but remains uncertain it was the best way to express it — such was the effect of the Effexor.

Grappling with antidepressants is just a chapter of A Brief History of Anxiety, though — its 172 pages are packed with Pearson’s personal anecdotes, along with detours into her own research, resulting in a kind of pop reverse-psychology.

A launch event at the Hart House Library last Wednesday involved a chat with Jeff Warren, author of The Head Trip, who prefaced the discussion by admitting that he also suffers from anxiety. Would any writer really have it any other way?

Rather than feeling cursed by anxiety, Pearson wanted to trap the word, and make it docile: “If I can figure it out, if I can figure it out, if I can figure it out — then I can control it,” she says. “That obsessive thinking also enables me to write.”

But after an admittedly embellished accounting of her own fears that opens the book, Pearson describes her obsession with a website called Flu Wiki, where the possible global influenza pandemic is continuously pondered. That same brand of user-generated hysteria is being used to promote A Brief History of Anxiety, reaching out to potential readers by inviting them to post at The Hall of Phobias.

This isn’t a self-help program so much as a means of encouraging self-discipline.

“I didn’t want to have to play pundit,” explains Pearson while on the train to the Ottawa International Writers’ Festival last Thursday. “The idea was that if I could hang the book on personal experience, then I’d be excused for not having a clear opinion on it — and, through my research, perhaps I’d end up forming an opinion.”

That is, an opinion on what’s wrong with her, if not necessarily you. Those who raised their hands at Hart House seemed overcome by fears of terrorism, climate change and overpopulation. And the aftermath of her talk in Ottawa was a number of people confronting Pearson with their own deeply personal dilemmas.

“What do I say?” she emails. “I can hardly instruct them to go read Soren Kierkegaard or Rollo May. All I’m trained to do is read stuff that interests me.”

Pearson benefits from having a few people already interested in her, initially because her grandfather Lester Pearson was the 14th Prime Minister of Canada — her grandmother, meanwhile, is described as “the only first lady in world history who worshipped at the altar of Dorothy Parker.” That acerbic wit, of course, is presumed in hindsight to be hoarding for psychological problems. Life with diplomat dad Geoffrey Pearson (who passed away last month) is also held up for scrutiny, whether during the years the family lived in New Delhi, or more recent father-daughter squabbles. Wrangling true-life tales of homicidal women as a journalist, culminating in the 1998 book When She Was Bad, also did their part to flare up Pearson’s phobia.  

Somewhere in between the adolescent angst and antidepressant dependency was a period of relative bliss, though: Pearson’s domestic life provided inspiration for two whimsical novels where stumbling into pregnancy, partnering and parenting produced one ditzy episode after another. The “mine” part of A Brief History of Anxiety sheds light on the darker aftermath of those reassuring storylines.

Yet, the family she started with Ambrose Pottie — he was once the drummer in the band Crash Vegas — remains intact through the described crippling episodes.

Faith also emerges as a factor in Pearson’s life. While a review in Quill & Quire noted the book's  conclusion “feels rushed and uncharacteristically opaque,” the author is aware of the short shrift on religion: “I probably shouldn’t have rushed it in,” she says. “I didn’t have a fully articulated sense of it.” But she’s now an Anglican churchgoer, prompted by 10-year-old daughter Clara, who was initially curious about the gothic symbolism on the outside: “She wanted to have a cosmology.”

But with its basic refusal to buy into the secular perspective that reason trumps anxiety, Pearson’s book catches the wave of titles countering that atheism — especially as argued in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins — is so last year.

More likely, though, A Brief History of Anxiety will be picked up as an empathetic gift — the cover drawing of an ostrich with its head in the sand implies just enough levity to keep the giver from having the recipient throw it back at them. The book’s American publisher went for a more Hitchcockian image, however, as Pearson explains they found the Canadian cover “too quaint and too effete.”

The greatest achievement of the book could be that it’s short enough for a reader to consume Pearson’s anxiety audit without being left to feel totally exasperated.

“I have to be funny about some of this stuff,” she says. “Otherwise, I’d be dead.”

 

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