There’s religion and sex and all the strange things that get thrown up during adolescence and a wry sense of humour that will suddenly turn in on itself, laughing at the notion of the book. Here was a family being a family, which is a much more complicated endeavour than most people think. It didn’t offer solutions or even take clear sides. It’s a rich, rich work that spoke to me very deeply. And Jenny is lost and wandering, trying to grow up and not knowing how or what it means. Jenny’ sort-of boyfriend is endearing, in a hopeless way his parents are Freudian psychoanalysts and tried to raise him to be normal (it backfired). Her grandmother drowns cats and fixes electrics and talks about blood and death and magic. Her mother retreats into a world she can control. Jenny’s best friend, Alicia, is starving herself and recites poetry backwards.
There are many moments when I laughed out loud. There are angels that turn up and cats that die and a father who simply has no idea and spends all his time writing a book about butterflies and emerging only when the tea runs out. It’s a dizzying portrait of adolescence, of all the different ways to go mad. And her grandmother is the opposite in so many ways a Corsican wise-woman plying her trade in Surbiton. Her mother will not talk about her feelings, is a tightly controlled and deeply angry woman. It’s told by Jenny, who is growing up after her brother’s death.
And then again, the book was just full of characters that I recognised – people from my life who had snuck into the pages and were waving out at me. In many ways, it was very much of its time. It’s a story of grief, madness and menstruation a work full of transformations.
This is another one of the Women’s Press books that I’ve managed to get my hands on. On the day my brother died, when I was fourteen, a grey, wet, windy day in late August, my grandmother drowned the cat.
0 kommentar(er)
