Our June Book Club Pick: ‘State Champ’ by Hilary Plum

That isn’t enough for a lot of people; when a journalist asks whether she thinks “protests like yours may be more effective right now than the limited care the clinic was allowed to offer under the new restrictions,” Angela retorts, “It bothers me that if I bombed an abortion clinic everyone would just get it. You could write that up without even talking to anyone … But if you try to do something else, anything else, everyone is like, whoa you’re crazy, who signed off on this?” (As this quote suggests, the novel is darkly funny, in a made-you-snort sort of way.)

Hilary Plum, and her new novel. Credit: Meghan Gallagher, Bloomsbury

People question Angela’s motives and commitment throughout the novel, which pulls its title from how her successful high-school running career continues to define her life. The story is told through a journal she writes—first on leftover printer paper then on long, crinkly exam table sheets—in the second person. The “you” she addresses is ostensibly a former hook-up who’s a reporter at a local newspaper, but it very much also feels like the “you” she is writing to is the reader, or—if this were happening in real life and not a novel—anyone who might wonder why she’s doing what she’s doing. 

State Champ is a short, tight novel that goes by quickly, and most of Angela’s journal is not about her hunger strike or deteriorating mental and physical state; it’s about the previous work at the clinic—its patients, her coworkers, the protesters outside. One of those anti-abortion “terrorists” is Angela’s nemesis, a woman named Janine who wears “sweater blazers” and, a reader imagines, attends local school board meetings just to be a figure of quiet intimidation. 

In the novel, Janine shows up to the shuttered clinic where Angela is striking, allegedly to pray for her. “Are you bored?” Angela asks her on Day 16. “You get that you don’t have to come here anymore, because you got it shut down like you wanted. Do you not have anywhere else to go? Stop showing up here like a little pervert.” As the story progresses, and Angela gets weaker and begins making less and less sense aloud (though her journal entries remain mostly coherent), Janine keeps showing up, though she’s stopped praying for Angela.

I think this book could, for some readers, be eye-opening about the life-saving magic of abortions: “You don’t get to say … she could have left him before it happened, she could have moved back home instead of staying, or gotten to the pharmacy before work even if she got fired for being late,” Angela tells Janine. 

But I don’t need to make that case for Jezebel readers; you already know it. What State Champ offers instead is solidarity; a look inside the brain of a less-than-perfect woman putting her body on the line to seek justice in the face of injustice. Sure, she’s technically fictional—but in times of darkness, the liberatory power of imagination is important. 

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