[REVIEW] You’re Fine by Gina Tron

276 pages, $15

Review by Spencer Goyette

Gina Tron, regular VICE columnist and no stranger to the darker sides of human behavior, has a voice that deserves listening to. In You’re Fine, her autobiography and first book, Tron leads readers on a twisted path through her own personal history detailing events both humorous and dark with a consistent candidness that is excruciatingly honest and magnetic. Tron’s insight into the world around her is often cut with sarcasm and humor, but it carries a depth as she tries to give meaning to the chaos:

“Sometimes people don’t want to understand how a person has become the way they are, they just demonize their current behavior.”

Tron seeks help from a psychiatric facility after being rejected by friends and family following heavy cocaine use and a brutal rape, yet she quickly finds out that the ward she’s entered into has an atmosphere of extreme apathy and neglect. Patients roll around in various states of drugged-up stupor, some shitting themselves so frequently that they are caked in their own excrement. The staff is brutal and negligent, the doctors are cold and mostly absent. Her personal narrative provides insight into how poor the approach to mental health, addiction, and sexual abuse treatment are in this country. Most of us are not aware of these people or fail to acknowledge their existence altogether, as if ignoring fixes the problem.

I’m familiar with Tron’s articles from VICE, and greatly appreciate the fact that she is able to weave together an eclectic narrative on the behalf of individuals whose voices are often ignored. As I worked my way through You’re Fine, I found Tron’s sense of style had been maintained and appreciated her ability to capture the essences of those around her. In the instance of the passage below, Tron witnesses an interaction between Natasha and Roberto, two of her fellow patients whose childishly narcissistic antics are darkly funny but, sadly, not infrequent during her stay on the ward:

She slipped on tight jeans with intentional rips at the knees and a backless shirt with a rhinestone skull on the front…the process seemed to boost Natasha’s confidence. She was admiring her outfit in the mirror, arching her back and pursing her lips.

“Why are you dressed like that?” Roberto asked Natasha.

“Trying to add a little style to the ward,” she said. “You guys know nothing about being different.”

Somebody kill me, please.

Pressed to review something so personal and unique as You’re Fine leaves me feeling like a voyeur, peeking into someone else’s fucked up life ultimately to question certain turns of phrase or cadence as if to prove something more grand about their existence to the book as a whole. Were there moments when the syntax was frustrating? Sure. Did certain sequences ramble to the point of preachiness? Yes. But at its heart You’re Fine is the culmination of someone else’s struggle, years of heartache, and detachment. How do you isolate the author from her work? Why should you?

Everyone, on some level, has felt isolated or as though they’ve been forced into a certain place by social mores and hierarchies. The fact that Tron was so willing to stand up and shout “THIS IS MY SHIT, THIS IS WHO I AM” resonated fully with me. While the subject matter is far from light, I feel like anybody should be able to take away something from reading this book.

Hopefully Gina Tron will be able to continue to write so that we can keep hearing her distinct take on a world we all share but don’t fully comprehend.

***

A few months ago Spencer Goyette was substitute teaching Special-Ed classes by day and mopping the floors for a shitty Rockabilly biker bar in Northern Virginia at night. Miraculously, he is now employed by the Smithsonian Institution. Spencer is an occasionally incompetent twenty-something living outside of Washington, D.C.