Me & Phil: My Imaginary Friend

Katie Darby Mullins conjures a magical, liminal space where her thoughts, fears and hopes are laid bare while she reveals personal truths about her lived experience - the stroke that changed her body, the house fire that consumed her past - to her friend, Dr. Phil. This Dr. Phil is ever present, larger than life, and has all of the answers. I am all too familiar with the desire to turn a stranger into an imaginary friend; a guide to be turned to when real people cannot. The space that Mullins creates and shares with us is brilliant, mystical, and intimate. It is also intoxicating. I didn't want to leave it. But when I did, I left it wishing that I had a Dr. Phil of my own. One who would be there to guide me. One who could envelop me in strength and heal me with compassion and understanding. One who would feel like home.

-Jackie Lee McLean



Disguising a memoir as a series of poems lets more magic in, and these pages are full of magic and significance, both reached for and accidental. A surreal dream-telling that's never boring and all makes sense, big feelings good and bad are dealt with and learned from, and you want to hang in for the whole thing.

-Matthew Caws of Nada Surf



Me & Phil is, in its way, a treatise on the nature of trauma- how a traumatic event leaves you stuck out of time in the same way that daytime television, unchanged for decades, is stuck. How we watch these shows that haven't changed for decades just because they're there and they're familiar and before we know it, we've found something of a floating anchor, and, through the anchor of Dr. Phil, Mullins captures in frank but elegant verse the surreal, circular nature of both trauma and healing, of ache and breath. How these are things that can't be explained in words because, as she says, "I can still hear it. And you still can't."

-E. Kristin Anderson