In Memoriam

Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich

This week I was gutted to hear about the death of Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich (a.k.a. Eris, or E.V.A), a writer most likely unknown to people who read this but a woman whose work I love and who was a great online friend of mine from years back; she was 29. The internet is weird in the way it allows us to make genuinely meaningful connections over vast distances and in strange ways (Web 2.0 as a form of digital telepathy: discuss), and that’s kinda how it was when Eris and I hooked up about five years ago.

The night we met it was my birthday, just; hers was nearing its end. It was after midnight here and the calendar had flipped to October 10th about an hour since. I’d been sitting up late getting stoned, drinking wine and playing records like I did most nights back then, fucking around on Twitter, smashed, for lack of anything better to do and to put off going to bed for a bit longer. Why bother sleeping when all there is to look forward to is waking up for work, right? I posted something about Courtney Love being a misunderstood genius and that Live Through This is one of the best records of the last thirty years or some shit like that, maybe something about what an amazing lyricist she was. Eris popped up within seconds and replied. The first thing she said to me, word for word: We are best friends now hi. And that was it. We started talking and turned out her birthday was October 9th, but because she was on the West Coast of the States the time difference meant it was hers and mine at the same time. Which was weird, as someone else (Manuel Marrero, who I didn’t know at the time) appeared in the replies and said, Uh oh - you two share a birthday. That’s not a good sign…….Good sign or otherwise there was definitely something going on. Add to the mix that her screen name - Eris - was the one I said I’d give to my daughter if I ever had one, back in my early-20s when I was eating way too much ecstasy and acid and burying myself third-eye deep in Robert Anton Wilson, Leary, Abbie Hoffman and a shitload of other psychedelic esoterica. I mentioned that too, and we got into a riff about Discordianism, all that, kinda off-the-beaten-track stuff that tends to draw a blank when you mention it but she knew the score alright (where’d ya think she got the name - not that I ever asked) and that was pretty cool too.

We talked a lot about writing, and she put me onto Expat Press (run by Manuel) which had published some of her work; when I checked it out, I was mad for it. She wrote the kind of drug-fucked, dead-eyed, nihilstic stuff I used to write when I was her age - I was older by about 12 years - with a queer bent, raw as all hell but all the better for it, full of blood and cum and guts and blades and junk and life and total fucking rage at the utter sadness and madness and pointlessness of it all, seriously smart too, even though it seemed like she tried to bury it at times. We traded a bit of work - I sent her a thing of mine I’d written way back about a sexually ambiguous couple of unspecified gender(s) getting trashed in the midst of mutual mental breakdown and she said it was like I’d sat 5000 miles away and years before we met and nailed her life as she was living it then, word for word, and it turned her inside out to read it. I was embarrassed cos it was an old piece and I always hate my work once it’s been out of my head for a couple of months and I’ve moved onto the next thing, but she got me to send it to Expat, and they published it with a couple of other bits and pieces I’d sent in at the same time; they were among the first scraps of mine that ever made it to the public domain.

Over the next few years she blossomed into a cult figure in the underground lit community, which centred around Expat and a ton of other similar sites, full of drop-outs, degenerates and weirdoes, proper outsider artists in a very real sense. Not all the work you read on those sites is great, but some of it is and hers was, unfailingly. After that first meeting we kept in touch, but it was patchy at times. Her social media posts alluded to heroin, meth, crowdfunding cash to get away from an abusive girlfriend or bail her out of jail; her emails and DMs read like short stories or ragged-nerved prose poems too, the terrible beauty that shot through everything she wrote. It’s impossible not to get drawn into the life-as-art-art-as-life thing, was there any difference between the two, and does it matter? Does it fuck. It was like the best and worst bits of a Bret Easton Ellis novel and no one wants to go there. Do they?

The way she lived - chaotic, wild, reckless, unpredictable - reminded me of some of my old lives, which I missed sometimes from the safety, comfort and sporadic boredom of suburban domesticity with 2.4 kids; when I moaned about how dull life had got since settling down she was like, dude, you’ve fuckin made it - why the fuck would you want to go back to living like this? But still the itch was there; talking to E, and reading her stories helped scratch it.

It’s a sign - another one - of how close to the edge she lived that I thought she’d died once before. In 2021 I had a break from social media for about nine months, and only went back to it when I knew I’d have to start promoting Ghost Signs. We’d exchanged a couple of emails in that time but not for a while; when I chased her up I kept turning up oblique posts from the outsider lit peeps saying they missed her, how quiet life was when she wasn’t around, stuff like that. I feared the worst but was too shit-scared to ask anyone, and it turned out she was in jail again; fuck knows what she was in for, but it was a relief she was there and not where I’d thought. Oh sweetheart, she said, when she got out and I told her what I thought had happened. You don’t need to worry about me. But I did.

2022 was a blur and I lost track of everything in the whirlwind so when she died - 10th July 2022, 17 days after my book was published on the 23rd of June (and now I type it like that, what was that about the 23 Enigma, and in Illuminatus! where it has a mystical relationship with the number 17? Half her social media posts were full of mad shit about astrology that I didn’t understand a fucking word of and I get the feeling she’d appreciate this. Come to think of it, I started drafting this on 23/5, a special day in the Discordian calendar, and if I told you the middle name a friend of mine gave their baby that was born that day earlier this week you’d think I was the biggest bullshitter in the world if I said it was Eris, but it is, and I’m not, and how’s about that for a motherfucking sign?) it passed me by.

How did she die? I could guess, but I’m not going to, not in public. I don’t want to know and I don’t want to find out. What difference does it make when the end result is the same? D.E.A.D. I found out she’d gone when a tweet popped up on my timeline that read exactly like one of hers, and I thought it was her with another screen name for a second; I decided to ping her for a catch-up, did a quick search and saw she’d not been active for a while, then I saw this requiem on Litreactor and that was that. Really knocked me for six, hence this.

I was in two minds whether or not to even post it. It seems ridiculous to be sitting here typing up a piece about someone who lived on the other side of the world, who I only ever knew through the filters of screen and text and occasional online video, when there were scores of other people who knew her way, way better than I ever did and she’s been dead for a year anyway; but here we are. None of that stops me feeling really fucking sad about it and I guess I just wanted to say it out loud, and maybe write this a way of saying goodbye. She’s another dazzling light gone, yet another body in my orbit who never got to make old bones; I’m barely past forty and I’m counting them with two hands already. I’ll remember her for her words, her energy, her brutal sense of humour, the way a text of hey, how’s you? could be answered with a story that’d make Kathy Acker blush, or plunge you straight into the most intense conversation imaginable about whatever the fuck happened to be preoccupying her right that second whether it was first thing in the morning (at either end, hers or mine) or last thing at night or anywhere else in between; the immediacy, the spontaneity; how she felt more alive than everyone else I know put together even though we were separated by an entire fucking ocean and the breadth of a continent; it burned off the page with every word she typed and her legacy in the transgressive literary underground will ensure she’ll never be forgotten.

The Eris of the Principia Discordia is a kind of mischievous merry prankster, as opposed to the malevolent shit-stirring schemer with the Golden apple in the original Greek, and I’m gonna throw a line in from her here cos it seems as good a way to sum E up as anything I can think to write myself.

I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free

Her novel Ruthless Little Things is available to buy here from the Expat site; you can check out a whole bunch more of her stuff here. It’s quite a trip.