A cool lucidity reigns throughout, from a soul in turmoil insisting on its own legitimacy, thereby reclaiming its power. “I couldn’t distinguish the symptoms from my heart,” she states, and it is entirely logical. In one or two stringently precise sentences she expresses the absurdity of diagnosis, the “polarising” effect of naming something in medical terms that is, in part, experienced, even engendered, spiritually. Of mental illness also, her voice speaks as a singular lament within the larger stigmatised area of human suffering. While in hospital, Mailhot is diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, an eating disorder and bipolar II. My brother and I went mad when they wouldn’t stop biting.” A few pages on, she writes, less bitter than mournful: “I feel dormant watching you live fuller than I can.”
When they fight about her habitual killing of ladybirds, it is not just about ladybirds: “I don’t think you know how poor I used to be – that my house was infested with ladybugs for so long. His inability to comprehend her experience and her inability to abandon her shame are a consistent mark of how the inequalities of their world are pitted against one another. Initially her writing tutor, he is the white male who lurks within the pages simultaneously as a figure of the beloved and a symbol of persecution.
The resulting account reads as a series of journal entries, later compiled into short essays and addressed to her second husband, Casey. The telling of this story opens at a point of crisis, when Mailhot, now living in the US, has had herself committed after a breakdown, and is given a notebook in which to record her feelings, her “grand, regal grief”. Mailhot succeeds in telling the ugly truth with rich and beautiful words, sumptuous imagery and an unforgettable speech She was eventually taken into care at 19 she married (“I wanted a safe home”) and at 20 she had her first child, of whom she lost custody while giving birth to her second. Her mother, for whom the memoir is written as a kind of elegy, was a social worker, poet and healer, often absent, frequently made unwell by household mould and an alcoholic, abusive husband, a man who also victimised Mailhot.
I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle.” The story itself begins on the Seabird Island First Nation Indian reservation in British Columbia, where Mailhot grew up in poverty, “overlooking forty acres of corn … only coyotes in the field, and crows, and wild things”. “The words were too wrong and ugly to speak.
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