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There Is No Blue
THE GLOBE AND MAIL : BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023 Martha Baillie’s richly layered response to her mother’s passing, her father's life, and her sister’s suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time.
Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author’s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers the author’s father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother’s. And then, the shocking death of the author’s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life.
In this close observation of a family, few absolutes hold, as experiences of reality diverge. A memoir of cascading grief and survival from the author of The Incident Report. "Martha Baillie’s novels are thrillingly, joyously singular, that rare combination of sui generis and just plain generous. That There Is No Blue , her memoir, is all of those things too, is no surprise; still, she has gone somewhere extraordinary. This triptych of essays, which exquisitely unfolds the “disobedient tale” of the lives and deaths of her mother, her father, and her sister, is a meditation on the mystery and wonder of grief and art making and home and memory itself. It made me think of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, in which the mending is not hidden but featured and beautifully illuminated. Baillie’s variety of attention, carved out of language, is tenderness, is love." – Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women
"This is a stunning memoir, intense and meticulous in its observations of family life. Baillie subtly interrogates and conveys the devastating mistranslations that take place in childhood, the antagonism and porousness of siblings, and the tragedy of schizophrenia as it unfolds. I couldn’t put it down." – Dr. Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad and Everyday Madness
""Exquisite." – Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife "I am grateful for this profound meditation on family and loss.” – Charlie Kaufman, filmmaker "This strange, unsettling memoir of outer life and inner life and their bizarre twining captures the author’s identity by way of her mother’s death, her sister’s failing battle with mental illness, and the mysterious figure of her father. It combines anguished guilt, deep tenderness, and bemused affection in highly evocative, often disturbing prose. Its brave honesty is amplified by a persistent lyricism; its undercurrent of fear is uplifted by a surprising, resilient hopefulness. It is both a plea for exoneration and an act of exoneration, an authentic meditation on the terrible difficulty of being human." – Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon
Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author’s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers the author’s father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother’s. And then, the shocking death of the author’s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life.
In this close observation of a family, few absolutes hold, as experiences of reality diverge. A memoir of cascading grief and survival from the author of The Incident Report. "Martha Baillie’s novels are thrillingly, joyously singular, that rare combination of sui generis and just plain generous. That There Is No Blue , her memoir, is all of those things too, is no surprise; still, she has gone somewhere extraordinary. This triptych of essays, which exquisitely unfolds the “disobedient tale” of the lives and deaths of her mother, her father, and her sister, is a meditation on the mystery and wonder of grief and art making and home and memory itself. It made me think of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, in which the mending is not hidden but featured and beautifully illuminated. Baillie’s variety of attention, carved out of language, is tenderness, is love." – Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women
"This is a stunning memoir, intense and meticulous in its observations of family life. Baillie subtly interrogates and conveys the devastating mistranslations that take place in childhood, the antagonism and porousness of siblings, and the tragedy of schizophrenia as it unfolds. I couldn’t put it down." – Dr. Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad and Everyday Madness
""Exquisite." – Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife "I am grateful for this profound meditation on family and loss.” – Charlie Kaufman, filmmaker "This strange, unsettling memoir of outer life and inner life and their bizarre twining captures the author’s identity by way of her mother’s death, her sister’s failing battle with mental illness, and the mysterious figure of her father. It combines anguished guilt, deep tenderness, and bemused affection in highly evocative, often disturbing prose. Its brave honesty is amplified by a persistent lyricism; its undercurrent of fear is uplifted by a surprising, resilient hopefulness. It is both a plea for exoneration and an act of exoneration, an authentic meditation on the terrible difficulty of being human." – Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon
184 pages, Paperback
First published October 3, 2023
6 people are currently reading
613 people want to read
About the author
Martha Baillie
16 books52 followersMartha Baillie was born in Toronto, in 1960, and educated in a French-English bilingual school. At seventeen she left for Scotland where she studied history and modern languages (French and Russian) at the University of Edinburgh.
She completed her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Toronto. While at university, Baillie became involved in theatre.
She continued to act after graduation, taking scene study workshops and classes in voice and movement, while supporting herself by waitressing and teaching private French classes.
In 1981, she took an extended trip through parts of Asia including Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Burma, Nepal and India. This experience inspired her to switch her focus from acting to writing. Upon her return to Canada, she acquired an Ontario teaching certificate and briefly taught ESL to adults and French immersion to grade five students.
Today, she works part-time for the Toronto Public Library. She has done so for nearly twenty years, performing as a storyteller in schools, and day cares, organizing poetry readings, and community film screenings.
Canoeing and hiking are two of her principal passions, along with visual art, the theatre and opera.
Baillie’s first novel, My Sister Esther, was published in 1995, followed by Madame Balashovskaya’s Apartment in 1999. The later was also published in both Hungary and Germany. In 2006 her third novel, The Shape I Gave You came out with Knopf Canada, and was a national bestseller.
In The Incident Report (2009), Baillie uses the format of 144 short reports to recount incidents from her own experiences as a librarian.[3] As a work of fiction the novel contains conventional elements such as "a love story and a mystery"; as a report, it presents a subtext depicting "how Toronto libraries have become a refuge for the city's marginalized.
Martha has had poems published in journals including Descant, Prairie Fire and The Antigonish Review, and her non-fiction piece, The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach was published by Brick magazine (Summer 2007). Baillie has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. She lives in Toronto with her daughter and husband.
She completed her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Toronto. While at university, Baillie became involved in theatre.
She continued to act after graduation, taking scene study workshops and classes in voice and movement, while supporting herself by waitressing and teaching private French classes.
In 1981, she took an extended trip through parts of Asia including Hong Kong, China, Thailand, Burma, Nepal and India. This experience inspired her to switch her focus from acting to writing. Upon her return to Canada, she acquired an Ontario teaching certificate and briefly taught ESL to adults and French immersion to grade five students.
Today, she works part-time for the Toronto Public Library. She has done so for nearly twenty years, performing as a storyteller in schools, and day cares, organizing poetry readings, and community film screenings.
Canoeing and hiking are two of her principal passions, along with visual art, the theatre and opera.
Baillie’s first novel, My Sister Esther, was published in 1995, followed by Madame Balashovskaya’s Apartment in 1999. The later was also published in both Hungary and Germany. In 2006 her third novel, The Shape I Gave You came out with Knopf Canada, and was a national bestseller.
In The Incident Report (2009), Baillie uses the format of 144 short reports to recount incidents from her own experiences as a librarian.[3] As a work of fiction the novel contains conventional elements such as "a love story and a mystery"; as a report, it presents a subtext depicting "how Toronto libraries have become a refuge for the city's marginalized.
Martha has had poems published in journals including Descant, Prairie Fire and The Antigonish Review, and her non-fiction piece, The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach was published by Brick magazine (Summer 2007). Baillie has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. She lives in Toronto with her daughter and husband.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
April 2, 2025
“Three essays, three deaths,” is the first sentence of this book’s back cover, but this book felt whole to me, and very much about life. I would classify it as a memoir.
The dynamics between Mother, Father, Sister and self could not be separated, the depth of each person mixing into the others’ story, shading and shifting who they each become. In fact, the book talks a lot about each person trying to locate themselves, and that conflicting desire we all have to both want to melt and merge with love, and stand grounded inside ourselves.
“Because of schizophrenia, said Christina [the sister], locating herself was a chronic challenge, an often insurmountable feat. Only in language did she truly exist — so she insisted.”
When I read that paragraph, I remembered how the story began, with the strange voicemail Baillie’s mother always left: “‘I am Mary Jane. I am sitting on the edge of my bed,’”
and the author’s response:
“Hearing her desire to locate herself I would smile; I too was trying to locate myself, attempting to do so in language scribbled in a notebook, typed on my laptop, handed over to an editor, returned to me, and so on.”
The author reads her sister’s journal after she’s gone and says, “She points to the self as both resistance and attraction. We wish (in equal measure?) to dissolve into and to separate from the chaos that birthed us.
The self becomes manifest, then slips away, fleeting as any utterance. We are returned to infinite possibility, to the as-yet-unmade.”
Don’t get me wrong, this book is about grief, and the loss of the author’s nuclear family. Each person is written with great insight and respect, locating them very well to this reader. But the book more often explores each of their lives together as a family with tenderness, clarity, and a quiet intelligence that never strays into the too dark or sensational.
Although I’ve been reading books on the margins of what most would like, this book lulled me much like Tove Jansson’s, The Summer Book. I could quote and quote to give you a taste of each sisters’ relationship to their father, how their different personalities elicited a different response, and how their unique absorption of him shaped them differently; how their mother was quiet and steady, and how she turned to visual art to locate her truest self. But I won’t.
Instead, I want to say that filmmaker, Charlie Kaufman, produced a female-directed and adapted film of another Martha Baillie book, The Incident Report, which was released in June at the TriBeCa Film Fesitval. Since I can highly recommend the writing talent here, and imagine that it translates well to fiction, that will be my next of hers. I also want to see the film it’s based on, Darkest Miriam, starring Britt Lower. But if you do like psychologically astute memoirs about family dynamics with a window into a schizophrenic mind written in language to be savored, this one is slim and deeply moving.
The dynamics between Mother, Father, Sister and self could not be separated, the depth of each person mixing into the others’ story, shading and shifting who they each become. In fact, the book talks a lot about each person trying to locate themselves, and that conflicting desire we all have to both want to melt and merge with love, and stand grounded inside ourselves.
“Because of schizophrenia, said Christina [the sister], locating herself was a chronic challenge, an often insurmountable feat. Only in language did she truly exist — so she insisted.”
When I read that paragraph, I remembered how the story began, with the strange voicemail Baillie’s mother always left: “‘I am Mary Jane. I am sitting on the edge of my bed,’”
and the author’s response:
“Hearing her desire to locate herself I would smile; I too was trying to locate myself, attempting to do so in language scribbled in a notebook, typed on my laptop, handed over to an editor, returned to me, and so on.”
The author reads her sister’s journal after she’s gone and says, “She points to the self as both resistance and attraction. We wish (in equal measure?) to dissolve into and to separate from the chaos that birthed us.
The self becomes manifest, then slips away, fleeting as any utterance. We are returned to infinite possibility, to the as-yet-unmade.”
Don’t get me wrong, this book is about grief, and the loss of the author’s nuclear family. Each person is written with great insight and respect, locating them very well to this reader. But the book more often explores each of their lives together as a family with tenderness, clarity, and a quiet intelligence that never strays into the too dark or sensational.
Although I’ve been reading books on the margins of what most would like, this book lulled me much like Tove Jansson’s, The Summer Book. I could quote and quote to give you a taste of each sisters’ relationship to their father, how their different personalities elicited a different response, and how their unique absorption of him shaped them differently; how their mother was quiet and steady, and how she turned to visual art to locate her truest self. But I won’t.
Instead, I want to say that filmmaker, Charlie Kaufman, produced a female-directed and adapted film of another Martha Baillie book, The Incident Report, which was released in June at the TriBeCa Film Fesitval. Since I can highly recommend the writing talent here, and imagine that it translates well to fiction, that will be my next of hers. I also want to see the film it’s based on, Darkest Miriam, starring Britt Lower. But if you do like psychologically astute memoirs about family dynamics with a window into a schizophrenic mind written in language to be savored, this one is slim and deeply moving.
November 3, 2023
This is a beautifully written memoir about the death of the author’s parents, as well as her sister. It examines details of her life going back to her childhood, exploring childhood memories in a nuanced way. It also shows the effects of mental illness on a family, and how relationships can be viewed differently.
April 11, 2024
Wow.
Memory and its reliability/unreliability. Sibling love/dislike. Grieving the death of elderly parents. Grieving a sibling with schizophrenia while they are alive, then after they’re gone. Reflecting on a longtime family home and the phantoms - both real and imagined - that come along with it. It’s the Feel Good Memoir of the year!
But seriously, Baillie has painted a beautiful, gut-wrenching, sad and often funny account of a family’s turmoil, in a WASPy Toronto enclave. It has the best shades of Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Auster’s City of Glass.
When Charlie Kauffman is a fan, you know you are doing something right.
Memory and its reliability/unreliability. Sibling love/dislike. Grieving the death of elderly parents. Grieving a sibling with schizophrenia while they are alive, then after they’re gone. Reflecting on a longtime family home and the phantoms - both real and imagined - that come along with it. It’s the Feel Good Memoir of the year!
But seriously, Baillie has painted a beautiful, gut-wrenching, sad and often funny account of a family’s turmoil, in a WASPy Toronto enclave. It has the best shades of Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Auster’s City of Glass.
When Charlie Kauffman is a fan, you know you are doing something right.
December 16, 2025
there is no blue is an astounding book that moved me tremendously. bailie meditates on the deaths of her mother, father and sister, contending with how she may make sense of their lives (and her own) as the last one standing, and the immense impact of death on the construction of truth. bailie writes with such precision and honesty, as does her sister, christina, in the moments when her writing appears. it was really special and challenging at times for me to watch the dynamic between the bailie sisters play out—it felt tender and frustrating and overwhelmingly familiar, and i think it is such important representation of what it is to love someone so dearly who struggles so deeply with mental illness. i could not adore this book more, as crushing as the subject matter is, it is overwhelmingly heartfelt, and left me feeling hopeful that tragedy might be so thoughtfully and tenderly transformed into art.
“i felt certain that the truth about my father and my sister—the only one available to me—had to be of my own making, and that it would never hold still.”
“i felt certain that the truth about my father and my sister—the only one available to me—had to be of my own making, and that it would never hold still.”
January 3, 2024
There Is No Blue is a beautifully crafted memoir that details the intimacy of grief in ways that no conversation can ever do justice.
Martha Baillie brings raw and authentic life to each page, carefully crafting each sentence in a way that captures everyday grief, longing, and guilt. Baillie brings to light the dynamic of sisterhood through this memoir of her mother’s sickness, her father’s reclusiveness, and her sister’s suicide. There is no review that can prepare you for what you will read.
Being an older sister, I spent much of my time reading There Is No Blue in awe of how well sisterhood is dissected. The dynamics I had felt but had never thought twice about. The relationships, the suffering, the differences in feelings and thoughts are captured gracefully and honestly.
This book is devastatingly alive.
Martha Baillie brings raw and authentic life to each page, carefully crafting each sentence in a way that captures everyday grief, longing, and guilt. Baillie brings to light the dynamic of sisterhood through this memoir of her mother’s sickness, her father’s reclusiveness, and her sister’s suicide. There is no review that can prepare you for what you will read.
Being an older sister, I spent much of my time reading There Is No Blue in awe of how well sisterhood is dissected. The dynamics I had felt but had never thought twice about. The relationships, the suffering, the differences in feelings and thoughts are captured gracefully and honestly.
This book is devastatingly alive.
January 9, 2024
A mother’s dying body. A sister, schizophrenia, suicide, art. Questioning personal and familial narratives.
June 18, 2025
There is a moment in Martha Baillie’s THERE IS NO BLUE that I can only describe as an emotional collision. It is moments after she discovers her sister has died by suicide, where afterward she climbs on her bicycle and pedals past people “who were unaware that I no longer had the right to exist.”
Perhaps it was the lead up to her death, the tension in knowing that a moment described on the jacket cover was upon me, or maybe it was my own sadness intruding, but I stopped reading and gripped the book tightly in my hands.
I realized in that moment that I had been invited into a sacred space, a room filled with so much beauty and sadness, a place normally protected by closed doors (sometimes locked). In THERE IS NO BLUE, the reader doesn’t simply witness grief, we observe how one might write about it.
It is not just the “shaping of the narrative to suit her needs” (Martha writes) but shaping narrative so that it might in some way pay tribute to a sister, a mother, and a father, that we might comprehend the many unknowable truths that die with the people we love most in the world.
THERE IS NO BLUE is a deeply personal biography of a family. Alongside the telling of what happened to Martha’s sister, and in learning who her mother and father had been, we get poetry, fiction, journal entries, and letters interwoven among the graceful poetry of Martha Baillie’s own prose. A conjuring of the self we might see through the eyes of another; what we see when we look in the mirror; how we imagine ourselves in our writing, and the incredible miraculous intimate beauty of life and death, particularly poignant in a scene where Martha washes her mother after her death. Martha Baillie shares her grief with us, and it is in the meandering nonlinear narrative where we find the truth about this sad, secret emotion – that it is the most beautiful, most important journey of our existence.
Perhaps it was the lead up to her death, the tension in knowing that a moment described on the jacket cover was upon me, or maybe it was my own sadness intruding, but I stopped reading and gripped the book tightly in my hands.
I realized in that moment that I had been invited into a sacred space, a room filled with so much beauty and sadness, a place normally protected by closed doors (sometimes locked). In THERE IS NO BLUE, the reader doesn’t simply witness grief, we observe how one might write about it.
It is not just the “shaping of the narrative to suit her needs” (Martha writes) but shaping narrative so that it might in some way pay tribute to a sister, a mother, and a father, that we might comprehend the many unknowable truths that die with the people we love most in the world.
THERE IS NO BLUE is a deeply personal biography of a family. Alongside the telling of what happened to Martha’s sister, and in learning who her mother and father had been, we get poetry, fiction, journal entries, and letters interwoven among the graceful poetry of Martha Baillie’s own prose. A conjuring of the self we might see through the eyes of another; what we see when we look in the mirror; how we imagine ourselves in our writing, and the incredible miraculous intimate beauty of life and death, particularly poignant in a scene where Martha washes her mother after her death. Martha Baillie shares her grief with us, and it is in the meandering nonlinear narrative where we find the truth about this sad, secret emotion – that it is the most beautiful, most important journey of our existence.
February 28, 2025
“There is no blue, there is only out of the blue”
Truly one of the best books I’ve read that depicts the complex nature of filial duty and grief. Martha does an exceptional job of describing mother-daughter relationships in such a sad yet objective manner. Most parents don’t intend to traumatise their children but most end up doing it regardless especially their daughters. Martha loved her sister Christina and you can see it in her writing and in her guilt but she really did try her best.
Christina’s story is tragic but also full of so much strength and resilience. From an early age she was thrust into a world of adult politics that she could not understand. Her speculation that she may have been neurodivergent was evident in her childhood in which her father would spank her and comment on her body- this memory later transformed into her believing he molested her. Martha neither denied nor confirmed it. Only acknowledging that the past does not hold still and that it is ever moving. Their mother an Artist, was an accomplice in the father’s pedophilia to Christina and her purposeful ignorance angered her - the refusal to acknowledge and look at the wounds caused by her parents. She would later write “ I was taken to a park so my landlord could enjoy nature, she is 99 and will die soon. She’s become quite a sweet child. Far less dangerous than she use to be. I’m afraid that when she dies I will feel skinned alive. Once my life-long battle with the soggy-dragon is over what will I write about ? How will I continue ?”. Unfortunately the hurt parents cause stays with children forever and creates the agonising love-hate relationship that Christina had with her mother.
Truly one of the best books I’ve read that depicts the complex nature of filial duty and grief. Martha does an exceptional job of describing mother-daughter relationships in such a sad yet objective manner. Most parents don’t intend to traumatise their children but most end up doing it regardless especially their daughters. Martha loved her sister Christina and you can see it in her writing and in her guilt but she really did try her best.
Christina’s story is tragic but also full of so much strength and resilience. From an early age she was thrust into a world of adult politics that she could not understand. Her speculation that she may have been neurodivergent was evident in her childhood in which her father would spank her and comment on her body- this memory later transformed into her believing he molested her. Martha neither denied nor confirmed it. Only acknowledging that the past does not hold still and that it is ever moving. Their mother an Artist, was an accomplice in the father’s pedophilia to Christina and her purposeful ignorance angered her - the refusal to acknowledge and look at the wounds caused by her parents. She would later write “ I was taken to a park so my landlord could enjoy nature, she is 99 and will die soon. She’s become quite a sweet child. Far less dangerous than she use to be. I’m afraid that when she dies I will feel skinned alive. Once my life-long battle with the soggy-dragon is over what will I write about ? How will I continue ?”. Unfortunately the hurt parents cause stays with children forever and creates the agonising love-hate relationship that Christina had with her mother.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 9, 2023
|| THERE IS NO BLUE ||
#gifted @coachhousebooks
#nonfictionnovember
✍🏻
A gorgeous, vulnerable, reflective meditation on family, loss, love, mental illness, death and suicide.
I was first drawn to this book by the incredible image on the cover titled Pensive Woman, which is a painting by the authors mother Mary Jane Holmes Baillie. And of course the title (any titles with the word Blue in them always grab me). Both are so fitting for this book.
There Is No Blue I found in the same vein as works by Didion and Ernaux. Well written, I thoroughly enjoyed this, although strange to say because of the context of these pages. In three essays Baillie explores three deaths, her mother, her father, and her sister. There Is No Blue is incredibly nuanced, and thoughtful. I read this book in a day. Each essay flowed so well into the next, like companion pieces. Slide for some of my favorite passages. It was interesting how she examined each death experience. Her mothers was loving and thoughtful, her fathers was remote, much like he was, and her sisters was shocking, and complex as she had schizophrenia and committed suicide. This book is an exquisite addition to other books on loss and exploration of families and their relationships.
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
#gifted @coachhousebooks
#nonfictionnovember
✍🏻
A gorgeous, vulnerable, reflective meditation on family, loss, love, mental illness, death and suicide.
I was first drawn to this book by the incredible image on the cover titled Pensive Woman, which is a painting by the authors mother Mary Jane Holmes Baillie. And of course the title (any titles with the word Blue in them always grab me). Both are so fitting for this book.
There Is No Blue I found in the same vein as works by Didion and Ernaux. Well written, I thoroughly enjoyed this, although strange to say because of the context of these pages. In three essays Baillie explores three deaths, her mother, her father, and her sister. There Is No Blue is incredibly nuanced, and thoughtful. I read this book in a day. Each essay flowed so well into the next, like companion pieces. Slide for some of my favorite passages. It was interesting how she examined each death experience. Her mothers was loving and thoughtful, her fathers was remote, much like he was, and her sisters was shocking, and complex as she had schizophrenia and committed suicide. This book is an exquisite addition to other books on loss and exploration of families and their relationships.
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
August 6, 2025
So lucky to have been introduced to this author at the Lakefield Literary Festival. Searing honesty here.
January 24, 2024
As soon as I heard this book was edited by André Alexis I knew I had to read it because he’s one of my fave authors. I loved this book! THERE IS NO BLUE by Martha Baillie is a stunning memoir. Told in three essays about the deaths of her mother, father and sister this writing is a deep exploration of grief. She writes candidly about her sister who was an artist and writer living with schizophrenia. Baillie returns again and again to unpack the poem her sister left and by the end of this book I felt that profound loss. This is powerful writing.
Thank you to Coach House Books for my gifted review copy!
Thank you to Coach House Books for my gifted review copy!
August 12, 2024
Hauntingly tragic, yet divinely executed, the 2023 novel “There Is No Blue,” by Canadian author, Martha Baillie is a captivating illustration of the impacts of loss, both corporeal and interpersonal, on the human mind and spirit. Baillie conveys grief through a commitment to her own truth, remaining devoted to the deepest possible exploration of her past and present trauma, regarding familial discord and disorder. Her commitment extends to her portrayal of each relative within her novel, which seeks not to analyze, manipulate, or confront their image, but rather, candidly approaches her relationship with them, while maintaining a sense of vulnerability that is fundamental to the novel’s charm.
August 21, 2024
2.5
Beautifully written but I doubt I'll ever be happy with any memoir of being the family member of a schizophrenic.
Beautifully written but I doubt I'll ever be happy with any memoir of being the family member of a schizophrenic.
January 8, 2025
“Our mother, too, was torn. She did as I did, and examined her memories. Two coroners, we laid out the past and attempted an autopsy. But the past was not dead and refused to hold still.” In the three dazzling, devastating memoir-essays that make up There Is No Blue, Martha Baillie is plumbing the depths of memory and familial narrative to consider her place in her family — her mother, father, and sister — each of whom is dead. The essays move forward in time yet each one dives further into the past than the essay before; the third and final essay focuses on the suicide of Baillie’s sister/sometime-collaborator, Christina, as well as the ways she struggled with schizophrenia since her teens. The unbearably hellish depths of Baillie’s grief somehow do not veer into the self-indulgent, and rather than a trite kind of poetic voice that lends itself to so much grief writing, Baillie adopts a tone far more analytical, rooted in language not as some basic coping mechanism or necessity but as a factor that defined her sister’s experience of reality and herself within it. “Only in language did she truly exist — so she insisted.” Elsewhere, of her father’s love of mathematics, she writes that “There was a language he spoke that I did not care to understand, certain it could bring me no pleasure.” I will be thinking about this blue book, its clouds of ash, its clung-to beliefs, its use of the phrase “stabbed in the *I*”, for a long time. “Never again — death's finality is like a blow to the head. Were life a cartoon, being punched by the death of a person you love would make you see stars.” You really see those stars through Baillie’s eyes. In the words of Christina: “There is no blue. There is only out of the blue”.
April 4, 2024
This reminds me very much of last year’s Just Once, No More by Charles Foran… different but similar.
The author “interrogates” - deconstructs - all aspects of her familial relations - be they the parent-child relationships or the sibling relationship.
This strikes awfully close to home for me - and while I really enjoyed listening to this one there were so many times where I wished I had a hard copy to be able take photos of pages and mark them up. It was far too much to ask while I was driving and listening - especially in the nasty weather that was my return trip home this afternoon, in the traffic no less.
A recommended read.
The author “interrogates” - deconstructs - all aspects of her familial relations - be they the parent-child relationships or the sibling relationship.
This strikes awfully close to home for me - and while I really enjoyed listening to this one there were so many times where I wished I had a hard copy to be able take photos of pages and mark them up. It was far too much to ask while I was driving and listening - especially in the nasty weather that was my return trip home this afternoon, in the traffic no less.
A recommended read.
August 13, 2024
Unsparing of the writer and the reader, these essays/meditations/open wounds that are the deaths of the author's parents and suicide of a sister are very hard going but oh so beautifully written. The unflinching gaze, the tenderness in the midst of all the loss made this utterly compelling. The mentally ill sister's suicide and the love/hate/push/pull of family relationships reminded me of Miriam Toews, another brave and beautiful writer. Recommended but...ouch.
October 18, 2023
This is a brilliant book/memoir/essay collection about grief, mental health, and art. Her discussion of the losses of her family members, particularly her sister, and how she places herself within each loss without making it about her, unfolds a deep reflection of how loss is navigated and the importance of trying to understand the world through other's eyes.
January 19, 2025
Inspired to read this book when listening to Martha interview on Nathan Whitlock’s podcast, What Happened Next. Such a writer and such a heart wrenching memoir, especially the pages that capture life with Martha’s sister Christina who lived with schizophrenia. I would like to read the book the two sisters wrote together before Christina’s death by suicide.
January 7, 2024
This book is an exploration of the author’s grief at the loss of her family members. Really well-written; however, it can be heavy at times. Consider picking up this book another time if you’re going through an acute grief experience.
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May 30, 20244 stars
The first part of the book, about the deaths of her mother and father were exquisitely written and heartbreaking.
However. The majority of the book is about her sister, whom we are told was schizophrenic. And it was exhausting to read.
The first part of the book, about the deaths of her mother and father were exquisitely written and heartbreaking.
However. The majority of the book is about her sister, whom we are told was schizophrenic. And it was exhausting to read.
April 21, 2025
At times uncomfortable, this is a really good (and often very lovely) book. The author describes stories she’s heard about her family, weaves in some letters and journals, opens up possible understanding and misunderstanding.
May 8, 2025
A considered thoughtful book in essays, almost vignette like, about the confusion and love that surrounds us in death. Deals with the schizophrenia and suicide of her sister. Please note: this may be upsetting to recent suicide loss survivors.
October 15, 2023
Measured and balanced in its subjectivity, and still full of heartbreak and love.
November 14, 2023
Beautifully written, suffering and longing wrapped up in grief, loss and poetry. I loved it.
November 29, 2023
A book I love without question. The third essay being one of the most absorbing and touching essays I've ever read.
January 23, 2024
This is such a well written memoir. I found myself getting lost in the prose and often forgetting I was reading non-fiction.
September 3, 2024
Really loved parts of this book.
I’m not usually a non fiction fan but found this easy to read and understand.
I’m not usually a non fiction fan but found this easy to read and understand.
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October 12, 2024Piercing analysis of grief and attempt to understand the lives that cause grief . Family and schizophrenia are its main motifs,
January 9, 2025
Moving journey through lives lived. Touching and graphic.
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