One of the worst and perhaps least understood aspects of my condition is the recurring, and often debilitating, inability to perform everyday tasks. I recently read Marian Keyes’ The Mystery of Mercy Close and was very impressed with the way she laid her own experiences with depression bare. I did however feel that she sugar coated one aspect; the main character’s inability to maintain her personal hygiene. In the novel, Helen is very aware of how often she bathes and whether or not she has done so in the last twenty-four hours. When she hasn’t, she often relies upon people to press her into doing so. This is one area where my experience of depression does not match with Marian’s description.
I love showers. I find there is nothing better. Scorching water that’s just slightly too hot, that you leave running so long the whole room becomes a sauna; shower gels in a variety of flavours that leave your skin smelling and feeling great; shampoo, conditions, the feeling of freshly shaved legs against your pjs when you fall asleep at night. Taking a long shower is one of my favourite things to do, especially when I’m not in a good mood. Water washes away all manner of troubles.
You can imagine then how upsetting it is for me, to come back to my senses one day and discover, based on the state of my hair and the less than pleasant aroma emanating from my own body, that it has clearly been days since I last took a shower. Again.
This often happens when I am in my depressed cycles. It happened again today, when I realised that it was (to my shame) at least a week since I last took a shower. The very thought of this disgusts me and I find it a less than pleasant thing to admit to, however it fits with a pattern of behaviour I notice at times like this. For example, I also realised today that I neglected to post a blog last Sunday. I began writing it—a rather humorous anecdote about an ill-fated trip to Ikea for some new office furniture—but in the days between then and now I have somehow managed to forget to do it.
Showering is much the same. Unlike Helen, in Keyes’ novel, I am unaware for long stretches that I have forgotten to do common things like shower, eat, sleep, brush my teeth, leave the house, take my MEDs. The latter is particularly problematic, as failing to take my MEDs properly only makes everything worse. It is as if my mind crumbles and those parts that retain the information that tells me what I’m supposed to do in a day, are blowing away on the wind.
There are times when this condition of mine leaves me trapped in a loop. I sleep, I wake, I endure an indeterminate number of hours before once more falling asleep and repeating. What I do in my waking hours is extremely limited, firstly by my energy levels, which are almost non-existent, and secondly by the simple will to do things. I find it difficult at these times to do anything, even things I know to be very important, such as work, meeting deadlines, and keeping appointments.
I believe this is one of the hardest things for people who don’t suffer from any form of mental health illness to understand. It can appear to the outside observer to be laziness. I even berate myself on occasion for being ‘so lazy’, yet it is not always that I don’t wish to do things, but more that I find I can’t muster the impetous to do them even when I want to. Sometimes even when I desperately want to. It has taken me all day to manage to have a shower and write this (brief) post. Why? My mind is scattered. It is difficult to retain a thought for long enough to follow through on it, especially when it involves expending energy, which I have in very short supply.
People often try to ‘help’ when I’m like this, by insisting I ‘get out more’ or refuse to allow me my creature comforts (in my case DVDs) unless I get in the shower. Sometimes it works. Most often it just makes me feel worse.
The furniture I bought last week remains partially constructed in my office. The contents of my office are currently all over the house, making a terrible mess which is stressing me out no end. I can’t abide it. Yet I do not have the energy to finish putting that furniture together. I keep walking into the room, picking up a bit of shelf, staring at it vacantly for half and hour or so, then replacing it exactly where it was before and walking out again. As I recall, this happened once when I moved house. It took six months for me to unpack anything. I existed in a state of perpetual stress because every time I moved in my minuscule flat I fell over something, and yet I could not bring myself to do anything about it.
Since turning twenty-eight earlier this year I have found myself contemplating more and more the achievements I have made in life. As I approach thirty, I find I am deeply unsatisfied with what I have ‘achieved’. In fact, when I look back on where I was in my life ten years ago and compare it to now, I find that—with the exception of a University education I seem unable to complete at present—I have nothing to show for my time. I wonder how much more I would have to show for my time, had I not so often been hindered by this state of what I have come to see as ‘pause’. I feel as if someone has pressed a remote and paused me, while the rest of the world continues unobstructed. I still move, but so slowly that it is barely noticeable, so sluggishly that I am unable to think properly.
It took me all day today to have a shower, and write this post.
I count that as a win, it’s better than I’ve done for the last week, yet still it’s pathetic.
Here’s to better days, and managing to get more done.
In July of this year, two extraordinary things happened in very quick succession.
July 11th 2013
I turned twenty-eight, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I enjoyed my birthday. The smiles were not faked for the sake of everyone who expected me to be happy. I didn’t get drunk as quickly as possible, in order to get me through the day. I didn’t lie awake at the end of it all, crying silently at the wall, as the night slowly passed by and edged towards morning, the dawn of another year through which I had no inclination to live.
Birthdays are always tough for me. I’m unsure exactly why. Perhaps it is the realisation that yet another year has passed, and still I don’t feel ‘better’, still my life is not how I wish it to be, still I am not ‘happy’. Perhaps it is simply due to my seasonally cycling Bipolar Disorder and certain memory-triggers at that time of year.
I’ve given a great deal of consideration to what it means to be ‘happy’ in recent months, but I shall save those musings for a future post. For now, I want to explain what happened in July, and how it led to the resurrection of this blog.
I’m not completely sure what was different about my birthday this year: perhaps it’s that I finally have a good balance in my MEDs and am actually taking them properly; perhaps it was the fact I’d decided we must have a joint celebration for my niece, whose half birthday was two days before my own, and actual birthday is so close to Christmas I feel she deserves another; perhaps it was simply that I was turning twenty-eight and, being as I am, a little psychotic when it comes to odd numbers, the fact I had a two and an eight in one year (my two favourite numbers), both of which add up to ten (another very good one), made me feel a better about the whole thing from the outset.
Whatever the reason, the decision was made to go to Chester Zoo, as my niece (much like myself) is obsessed with penguins. This pleases me greatly. She is already showing, at six months old, many sensible characteristics, several of which are shared with me. She is, I feel, progressing nicely.
She is also a turning point in my life, for reasons so complex I can barely find the words to express them properly. For years, I have carried certain burdens, certain ghosts, one of which is a miscarriage I suffered years ago that has quite literally haunted me ever since, and is one of the memory-triggers to which I earlier referred. It happened in June, at the end of my first year at University, and for whatever reason, every June that has passed since then, I have relived the event, as if it had just happened. I have been stuck, mired in the memory of a child I never even knew, a life that had barely even begun to form, for it was so early on when it happened I wasn’t even been aware of it until after the fact. I have never understood why this affected me as much as it did. I think it has a lot to do with my deep seated need for a stable family environment, something which—unbeknown to most of my family—I hadn’t had for many years by that point.
My niece changed everything.
When I first found out my sister was pregnant I was at once delighted and consumed by grief and outrage. I vacillated between a compulsive need to do for her the things I had imaged, a thousand times, doing during my own pregnancy, and an inability to speak to her for fear of crying or screaming at her and, consequently, causing her upset. The turning point came when she developed problems during her pregnancy, not uncommon, but severe enough that she needed regular help, couldn’t walk without the aid of crutches, and, for the final three months, a wheelchair. The all-consuming obsession with my own memory was utterly obliterated out by the over-riding need to take care of my sister and her unborn child. I no longer cared about myself, what I was feeling wasn’t important; they were memories, they were past, this was happening now.
I was terrified that, once the baby was born, I would go back to how I had felt before, that I’d find it difficult to connect with her baby, that I’d resent my sister, for having what I didn’t. Instead, the most bizarre thing happened.
I completely fell in love with the child. I was utterly besotted. And, more confounding still, I found I was no longer clinging to that memory. The anniversary of the miscarriage came and went this year with comparatively little in the way of reaction. I had slightly higher anxiety levels than usual, but we had anticipated this reaction, and my psychiatrist had given me additional MEDs to combat it, a step which worked like the proverbial charm. And so it was that I reached my twenty-eighth birthday, a point in the year that is usually my second worst, feeling very good.
The fact that I had broken what I thought to be an unbreakable pattern was something of a revelation.
The second peculiar thing to happen in July was one of those incidents which, to anyone else, would have seemed so mundane you would think me crazy to say it was such a defining moment in my life. I have often found however, that the greatest insights come from the most trivial of situations.
It was not long after my successful birthday trip to the zoo. I was sitting in WHSmiths in Chester, at a table in Costa overlooking the street below. I love Chester. It’s a beautiful city, not to mention one of my favourite shopping destinations. I was idly reading a book, but mostly looking out of the window and watching the passage of life beneath the window. People watching is a hobby of mine. I try to figure out what makes the rest of the world tick, what it is that allows them to do all the things I can’t seem to manage, and often do them with ease.
On the street below I noticed a cute little mosha girl. I could tell she was cute, even though her back was to me, and there was something very familiar about her. She was skinny but with a decent set of hips, swamped by a black hoody, and maroon cords flared so wide they swallowed her feet, trailing the pavement. She had long, straight, dirty-blonde hair, and as I stared at her I realised she could be me, aged eighteen or so, back when I still thought—at least occasionally—that the world could be mine; when I believed, wholeheartedly, that by the age of twenty-eight I’d have my shit together.
I stare at the girl and remember being her; the confidence, the friends I’d had, the way the bipolar (then un-diagnosed) only reared its ugly head occasionally, and the damage was relatively minimal, compared to the havoc it would wreak in my twenties. I recall with perfect clarity what it was to be in love for the first time and never question how that would play out: together forever, marriage, a house, a child eventually.
Barely a year later, all these things were stolen from me. I was never the same after the miscarriage, perhaps due to the changing hormone levels in my body as a result. The cycling of my moods became permanent, pronounced and rapid. I had no idea what was happening to me and neither did anyone else in my life. Those who loved me most stuck around, bewildered, but always there, even if only on the sidelines while I tried to figure it out, but as the years passed and I became ever stranger to them, they seemed to lose hope I’d ever go back to being that girl again, the girl who was standing beneath me as my latte cooled in my hands.
After that I lost almost everyone and everything I cared about. For the most part these losses were permanent. Those who remained in my life seemed so far away I could never touch them, never reach them, and certainly could never explain what had happened to me. My decisions went from bad to worse, and somehow, through it all, I was eventually diagnosed and began treatments, MEDSs and therapy. The first real turn came, ironically, when my house burned down at the end of 2011, and I was forced to move back in with my mother (more on that later). The second and infinitely sharper turn came this July, as I sat at that table in Costa and tried to puzzle out what I was feeling, as I stared at that girl.
I was sad.
Not in the usual, desolate, soul destroying way to which I’ve become accustomed, but in the transient way that everyone feels at various points in their life, when they are confronted by something unpleasant. Ironically, the fact that I was feeling sad in the ‘normal’ manner pleased me, because I had the distinct sense that it would pass. It wasn’t permanent. It wasn’t going to keep me awake for weeks, or months, wasn’t going to prevent me from functioning like your average person does. It was a sadness from which I would recover.
I was sad for the girl I used to be; the girl who could be standing on the street beneath me, as I stare out of the window. She had so many hopes, and so many dreams, and I have accomplished none of them. I am, in fact, stalled in a situation she would find utterly abhorrent: I am overweight (at that point eleven stone overweight), unemployed, struggling to finish the latest draft of my novel, struggling to finish my thesis, single, lacking any form of social life that doesn’t involve Facebook, broke, and, as the cherry topping the multi-tiered cake of despair, living with my mother.
The latter point alone would have been enough to send my younger self completely over the edge.
It was then that I realise something that had been blindingly apparent for a while: it’s time to change.
It’s time to change everything.
And this is The Great Epiphany that has led me to the point I am at today. It may seem ridiculous: surely everyone who is even remotely unhappy with their lives must think this on a regular basis. It is, however, one thing to say it’s time to change, even to realise it’s time to change, to want, desperately, more than anything else in the world, to change, and another entirely to actually do it.
Change, is bad. Change, is scary. Change is exceedingly difficult to accomplish in any true form.
Not only that, but there are so many things that need changing. It isn’t just one, incredibly difficult thing I have to achieve. In my imagination I see an infinite string of impossible to achieve goals, all of which alone are enough to cripple me. This string has tied me down. It has me bound so tightly I can’t even breathe. And yet, there is this girl on the pavement below me, and she is constrained by none of these things.
She is free.
I wish to be free too, and suddenly that wish, that desire to achieve these goals seems like the most important thing. Maybe it doesn’t matter if I never have everything I want in life; maybe the only thing that matters is that I continue to try, no matter how impossible things may seem. In the past when I’ve decided I’ll lose the weight, I’ll find the perfect job, I’ll get my novel published, I’ll find a new place to live, I have felt like an utter failure because, a few weeks or a few months later, the scales are telling me an even higher number, I’m still signing on at the job centre once a fortnight, every time I try and finish the new draft of the novel, something distracts me, and I haven’t managed to save so much as a penny towards a deposit on a new flat. I become despondent, I feel I will never succeed at anything and, more often than not, I stop trying.
Trying, however, is the important thing. Success is great, achieving your goals is admirable, but it is also something that people spend a lifetime doing; they don’t obtain everything they want in a few weeks, or even a few months.
I want my life to change, therefore I must try to change it, and i must keep trying, no matter how many times I have failed in the past, no matter how many set backs I encounter in the future.
It is at this point that I begin to hear Dory from Finding Nemo chanting ‘Just keep swimming, just keep swimming’, and the image looms in my mind of a giant shark.
In this metaphor, Bruce the shark is playing the part of my my failures, past and present, lurking behind me, and looming ahead. This is a particularly poignant image for me, as I have a pathological fear of sharks (seriously, even cartoon sharks scare the crap out of me).
Dory, however, has a point. My efforts and how successful they are will not be measured by how quickly I reach each goal, how many goals I cross off my list, or even if I reach them at all, but by the fact that I continue to try to change those things in my life I do not like, and that I am, as a result, as happy as I can be in the moment.
I spend a great deal of time thinking ‘I’d be so much happier if …’ that I almost always forget to think ‘I am actually happy right now because …’
It occurs to me that perhaps I am never happy because I am consumed by the pursuit of happiness, something which I have convinced myself I will only feel if I achieve all these apparently unattainable goals.
And so I made a decision: to no longer wait until I have achieved everything before I feel happy; to allow myself to pursue my goals at a reasonable pace, rather than expecting them to come to fruition immediately, then abandoning them when they don’t; to continue to try to improve those thing in my life with which I am patently unhappy; and, perhaps most importantly, to be realistic about the fact that, because I am bipolar, my approach to these goals and problems may have to be a little different.
My mistake, in the past, is setting out to change something while feeling well, then finding I am unable to continue, or at least less capable of continuing, during periods of illness. It is easy to allow these times to make you think you cannot achieve your goals, you cannot make changes, you cannot ever be happy, because you are bipolar. But bipolar is not an excuse to never achieve, to never try, to never be happy, nor is it something that is ever going to simply go away. It is simply an extra obstacle (albeit a very large and complex one) to navigate; for each of the things I want to achieve I must find a way that accommodates my bipolar. It is a matter of accepting the fact that my progress in all endeavours will—much like my mood—suffer from peaks and dips. I need to learn to anticipate these as much as possible, and build mechanisms into my approaches that accommodates them, so they do as little damage to my overall efforts as possible.
As I sit in Costa, musing on just how to accomplish this, I blink, and the girl in the street is gone.
In all likelihood she simply moved on. However, being as I am of a certain mindset, I like to think that, for one instant, two points in space and time that should never have touched, pressed together, so that I might be granted The Great Epiphany I so desperately needed.
On the back of my Costa receipt I scribble a list.
I use the list as a bookmark, and transfer it, as I finish one book and begin another, finish that and start another, so that I don’t forget what I saw and what it made me realise.
That very day I begin to go about changing the things in my life I do not like.
It isn’t easy. Nothing dramatic happens over night. I don’t suddenly drop four dress sizes, loose all my social anxieties and stumble upon a dream job with outrageous pay, which allows me to move into a little cottage with roses over the door and a ridiculously attractive neighbour who, as it turns out, happens to be the love of my life; this isn’t a Sophie Kinsella novel.
No, as I write this I am still, to all intents and purposes, in the same place I was two months ago. I am still overweight (at this point ten stone), still struggling to finish my thesis, still single, still lacking any form of social life that doesn’t involve Facebook, still broke, and, as the cherry topping the multi-layered cake of despair, still living with my mother.
And yet, I have finished the latest draft of my novel and sent it safely back to my agent, and no longer unemployed, but self-employed as a freelance writer, editor, proofreader and artist, with a sideline in publishing. My first book was released last Saturday (31st August 2013), and although it is an edited art volume rather than a novel, I am incredibly proud of it.
The resurrection of this blog came about as I realised two things: firstly, my online network of friends is one of the very positive things about my life, and I wanted to give something back (even if it is only material for them to use in relentlessly mocking me); secondly, and to my pleasant surprise, I am finding that some of my strategies are actually working well. As such, I want to keep a record of them, one that other people, in similar situations to me, might use. One of the worst aspects of bipolar disorder—and I imagine most other mental health conditions—is the loneliness. The feeling that you are completely alone, that there isn’t a single other person alive who has felt the way you do, and so you have nobody to advise you as to how to go about making yourself feel better.
I have felt this way often. When I was first diagnosed, it was a permanent, insidious presence in my mind, this thought that I was utterly alone. I read book after book about bipolar, and depression, even schizophrenia and psychiatry in general. Nothing helped. Everything was either written by people who were professionals discussing it clinically, or people describing their life events, but offering no true commentary on them, no real understanding of the why and the how and the WHY? No suggestions as to the cause of these incidents and how other might avoid such situations, no account of the way they have improved their own mental health since then.
The issues of ‘why do I feel this way?’, and perhaps more importantly ‘when will I stop feeling this way?’ are questions which still, for me, lack answers. Certainly medication has helped. Some of my more recent interventions seem to be beneficial also. As a result, I felt it important to share my thoughts, silly as they may be, in the hope that others suffering from that crippling sense of loneliness might know that they are not, as they fear, completely alone.
I intend to share with you my research into bipolar, my thoughts, my personal experiences and my experiments with various treatments and methods. I hope along the way to get closer to achieving my own goals. At the very least, I hope the expectation of weekly posts forces me to do the one thing The Great Epiphany showed me was most important:
I am, without a doubt, what can only be described as a die hard Marian Keyes fan.
I have read all of her books multiple times. She is one of a very few authors seen to be in the ‘Chic Lit’ genre I can abide (Jane Green is the only other consistent one). As a result of this, I was more than a little astonished when The Mystery of Mercy Close received such mixed reviews upon release. It came out in hardback first, which meant I had to wait, as all my other Keyes books are in paperback and I cannot tolerate mismatched books. Consequently, by the time I read it myself I was a little apprehensive, horribly worried that one of my favourite authors was slipping.
I’m happy to say that my concerns were completely and utterly groundless. The Mystery of Mercy Close is now by far one of my favourite Keyes books to date, and believe me that takes some doing. It ranks up there with Anybody Out There, and Angels; it has supplanted Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married as my number three. The reason for this is very simple, and is of course the reason I love Keyes so very much: this book is so painfully real.
Following Helen Walsh, the youngest of the Walsh clan and the last daughter of Keyes’ enigmatic, signature family to be given a book of her own, the narrative folds Helen’s money worries, as she struggles as a Private Investigator in the midst of Ireland’s recession, with how she, her friends, and her family handle her bouts of depression, and of course, with the mystery of the eponymous Mercy Close, home of Wayne Diffney, missing member of the fictitious Irish Boy Band, Ladz. At first, you wonder how all this will possibly fit together, but it does, if not quite in the absolutely seamless style to which Keyes fans will be accustomed, certainly in a manner that far surpasses anything a lesser author could pull off, if trying to write this book.
There is the feeling that the two main aspects of the plot—Wayne Diffney’s disappearance and Helen’s depression—clash slightly, and never quite gel in one perfectly plotted book. The book, however, is the better for this fact. Anyone who has suffered depression, or anything similar, will know the devastating effect it has, not only on your life, but also on your capacity to think. Things that used to make sense no longer do. Pieces of your life don’t fit together anymore, and you find yourself wondering how you can possibly be the person everyone is saying you have been for the last lifetime. In this sense, the novel itself is depressed. It doesn’t quite understand how its separate parts are supposed to function as a united whole. That is not to say, in any way, that it isn’t a brilliantly written novel. It is. However, the pervading opinion in many reviews that this ‘isn’t her best’ appears to be based on the misapprehension that this oddity in style is not completely purposeful, and reflective of the deeper meaning of the book.
As always with Keyes, the plot revolves around characters who are drawn to perfection, the dialogue is both pithy and at times hilarious, and quirks that can only be described as Marianisms about; as with the dreaded ‘Feathery Strokers’ of Rachel’s Holiday, Helen has her own hilarious perspectives and idioms (the most wonderful of which is, without a doubt, the Shovel List). It’s a well paced read, and vanishes in no time, and while it has moments of extreme seriousness and others of total heartbreak, it is also – thanks to the enigma of Helen Walsh – hilariously funny. Genuinely, completely, laugh out loud, borderline-hysterics, funny.
If it has one fault, it is that the Mystery is not as mysterious as it seems. The whereabouts of Diffney is obvious within a few pages, however the nature of the book is such that you actually forget you thought of the answer, as soon as the notion forms; right up to the end, you’re vacillating between one of about four or five possibilities, and just as you think you’re certain you’re right, something else happens that swings you in another direction. So, while the ultimate solution is (in hindsight) very obvious, the journey to it is exceptionally enjoyable.
It’s no secret that Keyes herself suffered a horrendous bout of prolonged depression, between her last fictional release, The Brightest Star in the Sky, and Mercy Close. What is startling however, is reading interviews she has given, and then reading this novel, for you realise that she has literally poured her own experiences into it. She has not simply drawn on the feelings she had, she has recounted life events on the page. Hideous, traumatic, and very personal life events.
Keyes’ desire to share her experiences is heroic. There are parts that can’t have been easy to write, and for many it won’t be easy to read, and this, surely, is another reason for the mixed reviews Mercy Close received. The majority of this book is not ‘feel good’, unlike Keyes’ other offerings which, while always having serious elements, are enjoyable to read the majority of the time. This book, however, is not meant to make people feel good. It is meant to raise awareness, and give people a real, genuine look inside the mind of a person who, for a while, isn’t quite thinking like themselves, or anyone else for that matter. Uncomfortable, perhaps, but necessary, if only so that those who have never experienced depression come to understand that ‘everyone feels down sometimes’ is a perfectly legitimate statement, but has nothing whatsoever to do with depression.
Due to the recent success of Flynn’s Gone Girl, many people are now coming to her earlier offerings – Sharp Objects, and Dark Places – having already read her runaway bestseller. As a result, this book is underrated by many, as they inevitably compare it to Gone Girl and find it lacking. To some extent, this is understandable, as there is no doubt that Flynn’s writing ability has naturally progressed since she wrote her first novel, and while Sharp Objects has an outstanding emotional plot of its own, the mystery is not on par with the brilliance of Gone Girl.
It is much like reading Her Fearful Symmetry after having fallen in love with The Time Traveller’s Wife; the style is there, but the plot is lacking that ineffable quality that made Niffenegger’s debut so utterly delectable.
Unlike Her Fearful Symmetry, which genuinely is a literary travesty when compared to its predecessor, Sharp Objects holds its own and should be afforded the credit it deserves. It does not have a plot line as riveting and unpredictable as Gone Girl, yet it is not the plot for which the book should be praised, but the characters who populate a small town in Missouri named Wind Gap. The are all utterly, and without exception, the one thing that fiction writers tend to shy away from as much as possible:
Ugly.
Yet they are not ugly in a physical sense, but in a psychological sense, and ugly to such an alarming degree that there is not a single redeeming feature, in any anyone from this town. It is a town of hostile, judgemental, hypocritical, shallow mind people.
It is to this town that Camille Parker, the novel’s narrator, must return, and in Camille herself, we find the ugliest character of all. Her damage however is not entirely her own doing, but a result of circumstance, as we begin to discover as she returns to her family home. With an adored sister who died when Camille was 13, an incomprehensibly abominable mother, a step-father who never acknowledges her, and a disturbing half-sister she does not know, it is no wonder Camille is reticent about her return. Her editor however insists upon it, and so she finds herself reporting on what he believes to be the beginnings of a serial killing spree, and the killer is targeting children.
This book is not an easy read. The prose is well written, although not quite yet developed to Flynn’s later flawless standard, and the pace is good, but the subject matter quite simply makes you squirm. That is, however, the intention. This book was not written to be enjoyed. It is about some deeply serious psychology, and the ways in which mental illness affects not only the people who suffer from a condition, but those around them. Camille, we discover early on, is a cutter (hence the title). Yet Flynn is not simply portraying this aspect of her character as it has so often been seen in the past – an almost childish cry for attention, or a result of extreme depression – she has truly explored the root causes of Camille’s condition and fully demonstrated just how destructive it is to every aspect of her life. Further, Camille not only cuts, but cuts words. She has literally covered almost every inch of herself with words gouged into her own flesh, by her own hand. This happens in people who suffer from psychotic decomposition, and have a level of intelligence that focuses their attention and energy on words and writing as a means of coping.
Flynn has certainly taken this condition, as well as aspects of the crimes Camille is investigating, to the absolute extremes. At times this makes the plot somewhat less than plausible, however she has done so for a reason. The violence is not gratuitous; the abhorrent behaviour of most of the characters is not there for ‘shock value’, or even for the sake of entertainment. Even Camille is purposefully described in the ugliest way possible, but again this is not done as a deliberate attempt to make the reader dislike her.
This is a book about damage. The damage mental illness does to a person, the damage the mentally ill can do to those around them if their conditions go untreated and they go without help, and the damage that normal, everyday people do to each other in the course of living their normal, everyday lives. This is the sort of book that shows you a few unpleasant home truths, as you see yourself reflected in the occasional action and realise how it looks to other people. This is the sort of story that lets you inside the head of a person who, due their outer ‘ugliness’ you would likely never befriend, would perhaps even defriend, but once you catch a glimpse of the reasons for Camille’s ugliness, you no longer see them as ugly, but simply different. You empathise. You want other characters to empathise too and like her, help her.
Camille’s childhood shaped her whole life: her personality, her flaws, her damage, can all be traced back to events she had no control over, and actions that were not her own. She is a product of damaged people, and as such cannot be blamed for her damage. To some extent, you even grow to forgive her for actions that would otherwise be incomprehensible. She is not without fault, but she is suddenly understandable.
She is also tragic, and by the end you are rooting for her in a way you wouldn’t have thought possible. You end up outraged on her behalf at what people have done, and continue to do to her, and ultimately at the fact that the one character you thought all along was one of the good ones, turns away from her when they see the ugliness she tries so hard to hide. You come away indignant that they couldn’t see past her physical flaws, empathise with her experiences, understand her as you have come to understand her, and find a way to help her. To love her.
The plot may not be scintillating, in places it is downright predictable, the prose might not be perfect, the characters may be inordinately unpleasant, and the topic may be brutal, but the story is brave. It is a subject that many skirt and most will baulk at; Flynn however has explored it to its outer reaches and reveals not only the ugly truth of it, but also the depth to which most people remain ignorant of that truth.
Few novels have proven to be as disappointing as this one.
The Time Traveller’s Wife was a wonderful read; not perfect, but still very enjoyable, beautifully written, and with a very unique premise. Her Fearful Symmetry held the expectation of more. The title alone is evocative. William Blake wrote The Tyger about light, and dark, and how one cannot be without the other: good cannot exist without evil. The ‘fearful symmetry’ is a reference to this, while the central characters of the novel – Julia and Valentina – are ‘mirror twins’. Add to this the setting in the shadow of High Gate Cemetery and the possibilities were astonishing. The woman who wrote The Time Traveller’s Wife must surely do wonders with this concept.
Or not.
Billed as ‘a delicious and deadly ghost story about love, loss and identity’, Her Fearful Symmetry fails on every single count bar one – it involves a ghost. The central ‘romance’ in the novel is between Robert and Elspeth, who dies in the first line of the book, and it is her ghost who provides the majority of the rather ill-conceived plot. Robert grieves, as anyone would, however his grief is hindered by the revelation that Elspeth’s ghost is still present. He then forms a tentative relationship with one of the twins – Valentina, or ‘Mouse’ as her sister Julia calls her – although this is more due to her resemblance to Elspeth than anything else.
There is little true love in this book. The most resounding ‘love story’ in fact revolves around two minor characters living in the house next to the cemetery. Martin and Marijke are hopelessly in love, however Martin has some serious mental health issues, which have proven impossible for Marijke to live with any longer. She leaves him, not because she no longer loves him, but because she loves him enough to understand her absence is the only thing which might convince him to help himself, and get better. She issues an ultimatum: she will take him back, if he is able to leave the house, and follow her to Amsterdam. This element of the plot is genuinely interesting, and when Julia becomes friends with Martin, takes on an entirely different aspect which could have been truly spectacular. It is actually Julia’s attempts to help Martin, and her love for Valentina, which are the most touching elements of the story, while Julia’s pain over events ultimately prove to be the truest emotions in the whole novel.
The notion of identity is never explored in any depth. There is a poorly constructed plot line concerning Julia and Valentina, in which Julia is supposedly the dominant and bossy twin, and Valentina follows her lead, does as she’s told, and fiercely resents Julia for it. The old adage of ‘show don’t tell’ applies here, for while we are told a few times that Valentina feels smothered by her sister and desperate to get away from her, we never truly feel that is the case. While we can sympathise with the ‘Mouse’, she has ample opportunity to assert her independence and never takes advantage. Her attempts to display her own identity, and fight Julia, are limited and badly written, the result of which being that later plot developments, which hinge on Valentina’s supposed desire for independence, simply do not work; the reader never feels Valentina’s desperation, and so her extreme actions are unbelievable, since they lack motivation.
The other aspect to the plot concerning identity is the fully predictable, badly plotted, and confusingly explained history between Elspeth and her own twin sister, Edwina, mother of Julia and Valentina. The intention here is clear: Elspeth and Edwina, themselves twins, had their own issues when it came to finding their identities. This is then ‘mirrored’ in the ‘mirror twins’, who are supposed to be struggling with identity issues of their own . Again, had it been handled correctly and well written, it could have been an excellent subplot. As it stands, the explanation of it is so convoluted – despite what happened being obvious from the first chapter – that it borders on ridiculous. There is no logic behind the actions of any of the characters involved. They behave irrationally, believing the unbelievable, accepting the unacceptable, and spending lifetimes doing things without motivation. It is a poorly designed plot mechanism intended to draw the reader through the first three quarters of a very uneventful novel with the promise of a ‘big secret’ which, as it turn out, is neither big nor in any way a secret, either to the characters involved or the reader.
Elspeth’s ghost is another wasted element, doing nothing of interest until the very end of the book. In fact, everything of interest happens at the very end of the book, yet the ending is not only rushed, but redundant.
This novel has often been described as ‘Gothic’, yet there is nothing Gothic about it until one scene at the very end which is truly macabre; had the rest of the narrative had this feel to it, the novel would have been spectacular. There are a few random references thrown in as an attempt to create a ‘Gothic’ feel: the twins discuss Steampunk in two lines of dialogue, overheard by another character who doesn’t understand what they’re talking about; Valentina tries and fails to make a black velvet ‘Goth’ dress for herself; and one of the twins remark that Robert would be a ‘Goth’ if he were a teenager.
This does not a Gothic novel make.
There are only three truly Gothic aspects of this novel and all are totally wasted. The ghostly elements could have been turned into so much more. There is a beautiful scene early on, of children playing in the graveyard, and it is obvious even at that point that these children are ghosts. Yet they are not mentioned again until the very end. While Niffeneger clearly did her research on Highgate Cemetery, it is delivered in sections that feel more like lectures than quality fiction. The setting should have created an atmosphere, a feel of the dark, ghostly and ethereal elements the author clearly wanted to portray, yet it does not. It is clinical. Further to this, the Gothic genre is not just about cemeteries and ghosts; it’s about horror, and human nature, the gender roles that underpin society, and the evils that men (and women) do. Only one aspect of the whole novel achieves this, and it is dropped into the plot near the end, executed swiftly, and then rushed so much you could literally miss it.
The ‘twist’ at the end is poorly executed, unfounded, and ultimately unbelievable. Ironically it is not the fantastic elements of the plot that make it unconvincing, but the fact that the previous actions and responses of the characters do not substantiate such a turn of events; you simply cannot believe any of those involved in the final sequence would act the way they do. This undermines the entire novel, leaving you feeling cheated – the wonderful potential implied by the title and premise have been wasted. Had the dynamic between Julia and Valentina been fully realised, the plot unfolded from the very beginning instead of crammed into the end, and the dark aspects of the plot fully drawn, it could have worked. The truly interesting plot elements are rushed through in the last couple of (very short) chapters, while the majority of the book is filled with endless descriptions, almost none of which are relevant to the plot.
The one redeeming feature of the entire novel is that it is written by Niffenegger. That really is the extent of the praise that can be offered. Niffenegger has a way with descriptive prose which is truly unique and a pleasure to read. That is not nearly enough, however, to compensate for the absurdity of the plot developments and flaws in characterisation. Overall, the book reads like a first draft; raw, undeveloped, full of mistakes and plot holes. Had this book been honed, and truly explored to the extent of its potential, with the first half of it cut down to the barest minimum and the last quarter expanded extensively, it might have been good.
Never has a published book more thoroughly demonstrated the benefit of drafting and redrafting a novel, no matter how painful the process might be; never has a book been more in need of a good editor.
One of the worst and perhaps least understood aspects of my condition is the recurring, and often debilitating, inability to perform everyday tasks. I recently read Marian Keyes’ The Mystery of Mercy Close and was very impressed with the way she laid her own experiences with depression bare. I did however feel that she sugar coated one aspect; the main character’s inability to maintain her personal hygiene. In the novel, Helen is very aware of how often she bathes and whether or not she has done so in the last twenty-four hours. When she hasn’t, she often relies upon people to press her into doing so. This is one area where my experience of depression does not match with Marian’s description.
Showering is much the same. Unlike Helen, in Keyes’ novel, I am unaware for long stretches that I have forgotten to do common things like shower, eat, sleep, brush my teeth, leave the house, take my MEDs. The latter is particularly problematic, as failing to take my MEDs properly only makes everything worse. It is as if my mind crumbles and those parts that retain the information that tells me what I’m supposed to do in a day, are blowing away on the wind.
It was not long after my successful birthday trip to the zoo. I was sitting in WHSmiths in Chester, at a table in Costa overlooking the street below. I love Chester. It’s a beautiful city, not to mention one of my favourite shopping destinations. I was idly reading a book, but mostly looking out of the window and watching the passage of life beneath the window. People watching is a hobby of mine. I try to figure out what makes the rest of the world tick, what it is that allows them to do all the things I can’t seem to manage, and often do them with ease.
I want my life to change, therefore I must try to change it, and i must keep trying, no matter how many times I have failed in the past, no matter how many set backs I encounter in the future.
In all likelihood she simply moved on. However, being as I am of a certain mindset, I like to think that, for one instant, two points in space and time that should never have touched, pressed together, so that I might be granted The Great Epiphany I so desperately needed.
