Depth Control by Lauren W. Westerfield Review by Courtney Kersten

DEPTH CONTROL BY LAUREN W. WESTERFIELD

Review by Courtney Kersten

Publisher: Unsolicited Press

Publication Date: April 15, 2025 

ISBN: 978-1-956692-94-5

Pages: 152

Louise Bourgeois’ Femme Maison series (1946-7) presents a series of curious figures: female nudes whose heads and torsos have been replaced by houses. A kind of domestic chimera, some women plunge their hands through windows or doors. Others have hair that flies from the roof, and some have no arms as if their limbs were lost to the houses they carry. Given that the French word for housewife, femme mason, translates literally in English to woman house, critics often interpret the paintings as a symbol of a housewife’s constriction (what Betty Friedan called the “problem with no name” in the 1960s), her life relegated to childcare and domestic duties. Yet, other scholars suggest that Bourgeois’ work represents the chasm between the mind and the body or society’s attempt to define the individual. 

Regardless of interpretation, Bourgeois’ work holds an inherent tension. The figures’ stances exude a kind of obliviousness to the hulking structures they carry (as Bourgeois herself said, the figure “is serene… it doesn’t mind”). There is no attempt to disentangle themselves from the houses they hold. As such, the viewer holds more information about the constraining architecture than the women who carry them. Lauren W. Westerfield’s debut book of “essays and autofictions” Depth Control (Unsolicited Press 2025) does not reference Bourgeois directly. Yet, it is no surprise that when I saw Westerfield read at the University of Idaho’s MFA in Creative Writing alumni festival in August 2024, she sported a tattoo inspired by Bourgeois’ Femme Maison series on her bicep. While Westerfield chronicles her narrator’s life decades beyond when Bourgeois and Freidan confronted the “problem with no name,” Westerfield’s work likewise grapples with how patriarchy functions in intimate relationships and, in particular, how women—even if they are not femme maisons—must contend with male power. Functioning as an assemblage combining poetry, lyric autofiction, and essays, Depth Control is an intimate study of what happens when we wriggle away from the arms that have held us, sometimes tightly, sometimes tenderly, and grapple with the marks that have been left behind. 

Depth Control refuses linearity as it chronicles the narrator’s experience with men, lovers, and partners across California and Northern Idaho from adolescence to adulthood. The narrator echoes Joan Didion’s iconic claim from her 1968 essay “Goodbye to All That,” wherein Didion claims that “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” Westerfield’s narrator claims the opposite: “Sometimes it is easier to see the ends of things, and harder to see how they began.” Yet, Westerfield’s narrator is still able to pinpoint the moment when the male gaze and its associated expectations arose. As a child, she learns how to “dress up” per “something [she] had gleaned about the ways that sex and power work in tandem.” The dressing up throughout the essays is sometimes literal: putting on lipstick or a specific outfit. Other times, “dressing up” means drinking, lying, or denying herself. Sometimes, the narrator embraces the male gaze’s parameters, for instance, appeasing a lover’s noncommittal stance towards their relationship (we “only call each other daters… cute but only for so long”). Other times, she considers, “What did wanting even mean for me—inside my life, my body?” In one instance, she mutilates her shoes, cutting into the soles of new boots, a seemingly practical act recommended to increase traction but also a kind of gratifying catharsis. Westerfield’s narrator is a testament to the permeating effects of the male gaze and how we grapple at different ages, often in contradictory ways.

For Westerfield’s narrator, the body functions simultaneously as a mirror and confidant. Yet, like any good friend, the body is not simply a reflection of larger cultural forces but a being with agency that speaks back. The narrator often distances herself from the body by contending with clinical definitions or admitting its confinement (“It is difficult to be inside a body. I do not like it here”) and looks with curiosity at the body (for instance, when learning about palmistry and the supposed meaning of long or short fingers). Meanwhile, the body refuses to be ignored as it rears itself through ailments and ruminations. The narrator’s history with bruxism, the nocturnal grinding of teeth, runs as a parallel narrative through Depth Control. Her teeth, their disintegration, and the attempt to protect them become a commentary on what remains unexpressed in the narrator’s psyche and relationships. As the narrator puts it, bruxism is “borne of minds in motion; nocturnal churn of language hitting bone.” To use Bourgeois’ metaphor, bruxism becomes a portal for the narrator to confront the uncertainty that comes with removing her maison and seeing the wisdom that lies beneath. In this way, the body becomes a source of knowledge in and of itself rather than a mannequin to dress up or hide behind. 

Depth Control is ultimately a reclamation of the narrator’s inherent power. In the essay “Madonna of the Master Bath,” the narrator recounts her relationships with one former and one current lover and their respective feline companions. The narrator’s intellect holds the blame when describing the dissolution of the relationship with her former lover. She says, “What I resented was the bait and switch: the way he started off enamored of my mind, then changed his own—decided, after all, that spending time with mine was too much work.” The narrator concludes that, of her former lover, “I’d been so busy wanting to be seen that I, myself, lost sight.” Yet, the body has never lost sight. In this instance, the narrator also considers what the unconscious holds.  

The essay weaves meditations about the narrator’s adolescent dream in which she gives birth to an adult cat. Despite the narrator and her present lover looking up the dream’s potential meaning on the internet and finding merely stereotypical interpretations, several of her female friends also report dreams of birthing cats (she notes, “I know that I am one of many”). Rather than a mere oddity or coincidence, the dream transforms into a form of feminine solidarity between the women she shares the story with and also between the narrator and her dream cat. As the narrator says, “… some slight knowing still exists inside me . . . that inside the inside of the dream, the two of us together—my grown baby-cat and I—rendered me impervious” to the scrutiny of the “outside world.” While the narrator’s former lover may have critiqued her mind for being too frenetic, it is within her mind, her subconscious, that the narrator finds solace, thereby refuting the former lover’s assessment. Depth Control is a narrative of remembering and uncovering the power that was inherent within the narrator all along. It is the act of taking off her maison and recalling herself as a creature powerful enough to birth a cat, choose to walk away from a relationship, tattoo her body, and remember she is a woman who can already say, “This is what I know. This is how I work.” Westerfield’s debut is a powerful collection that grapples with what power means for women in the 21^st century and a call to define and honor how we exercise agency in our intimate lives.

Lauren W. Westerfield is the author of Depth Control: Essays & Autofictions, a hybrid collection forthcoming in 2025 from Unsolicited Press. Her essays and poetry have most recently appeared in FENCE, Seneca Review, Willow Springs, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, and Ninth Letter. Lauren teaches Creative Writing in the English department at Washington State University, where she serves as the editor-in-chief of Blood Orange Review. She is also the outgoing nonfiction/hybrid editor at Split/Lip Press. 

Courtney Kersten is the author of two books of nonfiction. Her second book, Follow the Signs, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in 2026. Her essays have won prizes from the Bellingham Review, the Southern Indiana Review, and Crazyhorse and been listed as “notable” in the 2020, 2021, and 2023 Best American Essays series. Her work has garnered her a Fulbright Fellowship to Riga, Latvia, and support from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Image Text Workshop at Cornell University, Kunstnarhuset Messen (Ålvik, Norway), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Courtney is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Dakota and a 2025 Artist-in-Residence at USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway. 

2 April 2025