Mary > Recent Status Updates

This house is a thing both ancient and disjointed, an entity of addition and subtraction, a palimpsest of stone and wood and caulk and mud.

2022 and the past becomes even darker. Two more revelations, a rape and a murder, rock Gisele. She engages two new lawyers to represent her rather than the female who she feels is sensationalising the case anew.

G & D married young, seeking escapes from troubled youths. For D, G was a saviour; a refuge from a childhood shaped by a coercive father, Denis (who had married his older brother’s widow, Juliette, ten years his senior), alongside two older half-siblings and a disabled foster sister. For G, D offered a path away from the grief of her own home, where her mother, Jeanne, died from cancer when she was 10 years old.

I hesitated to start this book, but I’m glad I did. Gisèle, who describes herself as a mamie nomade, (an active, on-the-go grandmother) is very likeable. It's alarming that such an intelligent, grounded woman was drugged and abused for so long whilst those around her wrote off warning signs as cognitive decline.

Slow progress 😴

Nearing the end of book 2 and wondering whether to persevere; this one is something of an endurance test for me at this time.

Chadley’s trousers were too tight so was his smile - lunch with William (chapter 5 - The Club)

In the previous chapter Flynn introduces the word eident to describe his mother's lifelong nature. As a seamstress, she embodied this exact quality - unrelenting, painstaking industry and a quiet pride in her work.

Getting better

“The internet women are forever having epiphanies: nine times out of ten it’s about making courgette spaghetti or tucking your shirt into your knickers so it’s still hanging out at the back. They make videos about it!”
Love how magical realism debunks fake ‘on-line’ magic here 🤣

“He missed,” says Sandra, thankfully.
“But the scooped-out bit became Lough Neagh,” says Marion, “and the part he flung at the other giant landed in the sea. Nowadays we call it the Isle of Man.” Marion ta-das with her hands.
“Finn McCool was shite at aiming,” says Alex.