How To Hold a Cockroach: A book for those who are free and don’t know it by Matthew Maxwell Review + Free Download | EPUB, MOBI

“Go away, cockroach!” the boy screams at the insect on his dinner table. “Leave me alone!” A few pages later, at the bathroom mirror, he aims the identical lines at his own reflection: “Go away, boy! Leave me alone!” Same words, same cadence, a swapped target. Matthew Maxwell has built his fable out of that substitution, and he performs it twelve times.

Each chapter takes one thing a person might dread — the self, a lost love, the past, the future, an overdue to-do list, other drivers, death, life itself — and runs it through the same liturgy. The boy recoils. He recalls the childhood moment that taught him to recoil. He watches the reaction set into fact. Then he remembers the cockroach, wonders what are you, really?, and softens into compassion. Part II lifts him out of the stories altogether, into a wordless morning in the woods, reborn. A voice in his heart supplies the moral: you can choose how to hold anything.

The book is clear-eyed about how a belief gets made. It happens by repetition. The boy hears his mother shriek once; afterwards he notices “more and more evidence” that cockroaches are vile, until — and the sentence recurs almost verbatim in eleven chapters — “As time went on, the story seemed so true that he couldn’t tell it was made up.” There is the theory of suffering in a line. You are handed an interpretation, you rehearse it, it gathers confirmations, and you mistake the rehearsal for the world.

Watch what the book does to you while it says this. It rehearses. The template — recoil, origin memory, hardening, cockroach, softening — returns so often that by the sixth chapter you can feel the seventh coming before you reach it. The form works by accumulation, the same accumulation it has just named as the mechanism of the trap. By the time the boy weeps in the woods, eleven near-identical passes have trained the reader to receive “you can choose how to hold it” as simply true — arrived at by the process the book warns produces false certainties.

Maxwell seems to sense this. In the epilogue the boy meets a cockroach again, delights in it this time, and the narration adds a guard: “The story seems true, but he never forgets that it is made up.” That is the defence. The point was never to be rid of stories, only to hold the chosen one loosely, aware that it was chosen. Fair. But set the claim beside the book’s closing pages and it starts to wobble. The afterword — a letter to Maxwell’s unborn children — abandons the lightness entirely. He writes with conviction; he tells them they are angels and goddesses with the divine spark of creation; he promises the method will set them free. The maybe is gone. Whatever the boy manages in the woods, the author does not hold his own doctrine as a possibility he likes to believe. He holds it as fact.

In the chapter about the past, the memory is not a shrieking mother but a father who shoves the boy to the floor for trying to shield her — “Go away, boy!” the father yells. “Leave her alone!” The book feeds this through the same machine as the cockroach and the traffic jam. The boy asks how much he truly knows about the past and arrives at: “Maybe there isn’t a way things should have been. There is just the way things are.” I stalled there. The distance between a dinner-table insect that repels you and a parent who knocks you down is not small, and the method is engineered to close it — to treat both as neutral events awaiting a meaning you assign. The acknowledgments make the ethic plain: “Mom and Dad. You are not responsible for the stories I believed as you did your magnificent best.” Read one way, hard-won peace. Read another, a system that relocates the whole weight of harm onto the person harmed, since the harm was only ever a story they authored. The book does not ask which reading it intends, and it lays the frame over a shove and a snack with the same untroubled hand.

The gentleness is real. There are readers for whom “you always have a choice” is exactly the sentence that opens a locked door, and Maxwell writes towards them with a patience that never curdles into pity.

Allie Daigle’s illustrations are clearly meant to carry much of the intended experience; the book keeps apologising for showing them only in part.

The most honest beat is small and early. When the boy first softens towards the insect, he thinks: “Maybe cockroaches aren’t all that different from me.” The epilogue repeats the line word for word — after death has knocked, after the woods, after everything. Between those two identical sentences sits the whole book, and its problem with it: the boy has travelled an enormous distance only to land back on the exact thought he started with, now certain of it. That certainty is the condition Maxwell set out to cure. He may have returned it in a kinder shape.