Gregisdead121 ’s Reviews > The Elected Member > Status Update

I will never be the same. Gorgeous book that makes you randomly message your mother"i love you" at 2am - inadvertently making her panic at the sudden thick sentimentality. Parents aren't always the best people. Most of us spend our lives reeling from the childhoods they give us, all the agony of neglect,violence or emotional failings follow closely behind. Rubens outlines that they were once children too. Read asap!!

"He saw them all, and in them all, he saw his own loneliness
and despair. He felt tears behind his eyes, and in that moment, he
understood that his father had left him, that he was alone, that he could cry
only for himself, and those around him. And the tears flooded the blockage,
and he wept like a child bereaved."

‘Bella can’t grow up,’ he said to himself, ‘and I carry it. Esther married out,
and I carry it. My father, God rest his soul,failed, and I carry it. My mother
wouldn’t let go, & finally broke my back. Together, they sucked the life
out of me with ravenous appetite.Who am I, save their receptacle? Who am
I save their ‘happening’? Who am I save my own sad packaging? He looked
up pleadingly. ‘Teach me how to pray.’

'You’re going to pay for it. You bought my guilt, and you can take it
home, and you can live with it for the rest of your life. And together with
your little lot,’ she said bitterly, ‘it’ll make a fine parcel. Take it home,
yours and mine, and I hope it will rot you.’
She hated herself for her glib
and ready cruelty, and when he had gone, she gave way to her grief and
acknowledged her share of the blame.

"Once entangled in this procedure, it was difficult to
withdraw, because although every man’s madness, except one’s own, was a
monstrous repetitive bore, nevertheless, it had to be respected. You didn’t
walk out on someone else’s lunacy. You grinned and bore it, and firmly
believed that they should be put away."

"Bella had never associated years with her parents, and she could only make
the wildest guess at her father’s age. Your span of years didn’t seem to
matter until you were dying, when friends could assess whether you’d had a
good run or not, and doctors could safely ascribe natural causes to a
patient’s condition."

"Suddenly, he wanted to be with his father, to go home and to love him. It
was the safest thing any man could do, he thought, just to love and care for
somebody. It wasn’t a happy thing, it wasn’t even a justifiable thing to love,
it was safe, that’s all it was, and he longed to give himself just that kind of
security."

‘When I
die,’ he’d said, ‘it won’t be my death at all. Like my life, it’ll be somethingthat happened to my Mum.’

‘After six years,’ Billy said, ‘people forget you were ever ill. They don’t ask
you any more if you’re getting better. After such a long time, this place isn’t
a hospital. It’s your home.’