I Spit Myself Out, a collection of eighteen tales of female body terror, was published by SHC independent press in 2021. The striking cover, designed by Justin Park, was the mottled pink of abraded skin. A dark mouth expelled a tiny figure of a woman. Inside, the recurring motif of a stick woman, a fissure running from her brain deeper into her body.
I Spit Myself Out was the collection I’d been trying to write—and avoiding writing—for ten years. It explores my central belief that the deepest horror resides in the familiar; the psychological moment when everything you’ve known and trusted drops away beneath your feet. My collections are always tightly themed (it’s how I write best), so my debut collection The Unheimlich Manoeuvre (Boo Books, 2016) was set within the Gothic home, where familiar shapes reconfigure in malevolent ways. My second collection, New Music For Old Rituals (Black Shuck Books, 2018) explored the uncanny resurrection of folklore in the present, where individual identity is destabilised by older, darker, cultural beliefs. But in I Spit Myself Out, I returned to the core of my obsession with the uncanny—my own mortality.
Back in 2010, I’d recovered from a (thankfully brief) coma, to awaken to a diagnosis of late-onset Type 1 diabetes. A new and utterly confusing world of the chronically ill. Even when I was allowed to leave the heterotopia of the hospital, I was lost within my uncanny body—my familiar limbs and organs strange to me. I was a stranger to myself, in thrall to my treacherous, ever-changing blood glucose. Everything I’d done before as naturally as breathing; eating, sleeping, exercising, had to be rethought. My body transformed from an unthinking machine into an enemy; something to be feared and watched over.
I wanted to write about it.
I didn’t want to write about it.
But I’m a writer. When a crisis strikes, most of us turn to instinctual response of problem-solving. Afterwards, if we’re lucky, we get to process and synthesise it. And finally, if we’re writers, we start to unravel it, rewrite it, make sense of it in new words. So, slowly, these stories started to arise.
Initially called The Body Politic, this started out as a collection exploring a hospital as a dysfunctional microcosm, full of female ‘Other’ bodies that transgressed boundaries. And then I read Julia Kristeva’s essay ‘The Powers of Horror’ which deals with (among other subjects) the idea of the abject – that which the body casts off and the uncanny nature of what is cast off. As Kristeva puts it
‘I expel myself; I spit myself out…’
Interrogating Terrors
So The Body Politic became I Spit Myself Out, and the focus shifted to interrogating terrors that arise from the human body, and more specifically, the experience of inhabiting a female human body. From the bloody initiation of puberty through the abject experience of giving birth, to the traumatic upheaval of menopause, the female body is in a near-constant state of fluctuation. In this collection, the body is laid out like a game of Operation, it becomes variously a site of desire, pain, disease, ageing. One explicitly focuses on the diabetic body— ‘Love Like Blood.’ Some stories reflect the Covid period they were written in, like ‘The Cure’ and ‘Noli Me Tangere.’ From a brief spell working in a museum of pathology in Dublin I have a fascination with morbid anatomy that translated as ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’ Courses I’d taken in forensic pathology informed ‘The Wrong Ones,’ and my PhD student’s residency experience in the Centre for Regenerative Medicine fed into the mysterious clinic in ‘Becoming.’ Likewise, there are shades of Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Handler’ in ‘The Girl Who Kissed The Dead,’ and of Richard Matheson’s ‘Born of Man and Woman’ in ‘my ‘The House Under The Housse.’ But primarily I Spit Myself Out is a text that mirrors the body, and the strange things that lurk beneath the surface of our skin.
I’ve continued to explore themes of women and the body. My 2023 novella, They Shut Me Up (PS Publishing)returned to the menopausal female body to look at the ideas of epigenetic memory and the body as a portal for ancestral hauntings. My next collection, Queens of the Crone Age (forthcoming from PS Publishing in 2026) looks to the Irish Hag, the Cailleach, as an empowering and redemptive figure for women.
I may have moved on in my work, but I Spit Myself Out continues to linger with me. In 2022 it was nominated for a British Fantasy Award, and despite going out of print in 2023, it won the 2025 Rubery International Book Award. The collection continues to be personal to me, a haunting reflection of a dark time, but also the place in which I assembled the fractured jigsaw of my body back into some kind of comprehensive order. Getting the book back in print remains a passion project.
(c) Tracy Fahey
Author photograph (c) Suzanne Thompson
Tracy’s website is www.tracyfahey.com
About I Spit Myself Out by Tracy Fahey:
Eighteen unsettling narratives map the female experience from puberty to menopause.
I Spit Myself Out is a collection of female-voiced stories exploring the terror that lurks beneath the surface of the skin.
In this collection, an Anatomical Venus opens to display her organs, clients of a mysterious clinic disappear one by one, a police investigation reveals family secrets, revenge is inked in the skin, and bodies pulsate in the throes of illness, childbirth and religious ritual.
Disturbing and provoking in equal turns, I Spit Myself Out reinvents the body as a breeding ground of terrors that resurface inexorably in the present.
See here for details on ordering Tracy’s books.
See here for Tracy’s take on Building Your Writing Career. And read about Tracy winning the Rubery International Book Award here.
