Nearest Thing to Crazy (40 page)
Read Nearest Thing to Crazy Online
Authors: Elizabeth Forbes
Tags: #Novel, #Fiction, #Relationships, #Romance
What can we ever really know about anyone beyond the stories they choose to tell us? And how can we measure the truth within those stories unless we have lived those stories together. And even then, we each have our own lens through which we can distort, reinterpret, pretend. How truly honest are we with ourselves, let alone with anyone else? You see, thinking back on Dan’s story I kind of believe him. But then there are things which make it hard to trust him completely. Because there are things that simply don’t make sense in his story.
In his study there is a locked box in which Dan keeps his secrets hidden away. Within that box lies a small postcard and a book of matches. I ask myself why he would keep those amongst his treasures if he really didn’t care about Ellie. Surely, I tell myself, he would have burned the postcard – maybe using those very same matches. Instead he chooses to keep them next to the precious mementoes of his daughter’s life. And I don’t understand why. But I can’t ask him, because to do that I would have to admit that I had opened his locked box; and that I can never do; that is a secret I must keep forever. And will he, too, keep that postcard a secret from me? I don’t know whether or not I can believe in Dan. In the end it all comes down to something indefinable, like a gut feeling, a desire, an act of faith; for what is belief but something we choose to accept without proof. And aren’t we all just locked boxes, locked boxes stuffed full of secrets, and the only way we can ever really know each other is through the stories we choose to tell. But we’ll never
really
know the truth . . . will we?
Acknowledgements
To Broo Doherty, my dear friend and brilliant agent for all her warmth, hard-work, encouragement and faith and to Tom Innes for so fortuitously introducing me to Broo in the first place; to all at Cutting Edge Press, especially to Martin and Paul for producing such a beautiful book, and for all their support, and for making it so much fun; to Sean Costello for his fine editing skills; to the extremely talented Alessandro Massarini for his picture of Marcela Angarita’s hand; to Anira Rowanchild for her mentoring, enthusiasm and friendship; to Clare John and Dion Dhorne, my incisive writing buddies who were there at the birth; to Philippa, Neffy and Mary for reading the manuscript; to Chris Thomas for psychiatric advice – for the book, not me; to Janet Stones for counselling expertise; to Philip Briggs for police procedural advice, and to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for checking the facts.
Huge thanks and love to my family and friends for understanding when I was in the cave . . . especially my poor neglected husband Jamie . . . and for still being there when I came out.
The Inspiration behind
The Nearest Thing to Crazy
Crazy. A little word with so many meanings.
– I’m crazy about you
– You drive me crazy
– She’s so funny, really crazy
– The crowd went crazy
– My parents will go crazy – She’s gone crazy
– She’s crazy about her garden
The Nearest Thing to Crazy is a fairly ambiguous statement, because it’s near, but not there. And whose crazy is it? Who is the arbiter who actually decides whether you’re crazy or not? Because one person’s crazy can be another person’s normal. I find that scary. Is it like you have to go through some kind of laboratory-style observation devised by other people? And what if those other people are a little bit crazy themselves. And what’s even scarier is they might have an agenda as to why they want people – other people – to think you’re crazy.
In the old days, adulterous wives could be committed to mental asylums. Being a bit wayward, or independent-minded might condemn you to a life time in an institution. But that was in the olden days. Now we’re over all that. It doesn’t happen anymore. Or does it? I think it happens a lot. In fact I think it happens such a lot that we become immune to it, we begin not to notice it, or to take it as the ‘normal’ way of relating to each other. And this may be contentious, but I think it happens to women a lot more than it does to men, and I also think it happens ‘woman on woman’ as well as ‘man on woman’.
If anyone tells you you’re silly to think that; you must have got it wrong; you’re over-reacting. You imagined it. That’s a stupid thing to say. You’re being neurotic. Your husband thumped you? Well, you probably wound him up and he is stressed at work. You’re too stupid to apply for that job? The newspaper takes precedence over your conversation, your opinions are dismissed as you don’t know what you’re talking about? This is just the easy stuff. Take a look at the open forums on battered wives help web sites and over and over again women are told they are stupid and useless, powerless, and they eventually get brainwashed into believing it. And to reinforce that powerlessness, they get beaten, sometimes to death. Also, the important thing to understand, I think, is that mental abuse can be just as damaging as physical abuse, which is why the law is changing, right now, to reflect this.
During my research for The Nearest Thing to Crazy I came across a term called Gaslighting, derived from a movie ‘Gaslight’ made in the 1940s. It was all about a husband trying to distort his wife’s perception of reality. If the gaslights flickered on and off, the husband told her she was imagining it. Her things went missing, only to turn up in the places where they belonged, so she felt she must have imagined they had gone missing. The distortion of her reality was quite literally making her think she was going crazy. So the term ‘gaslighting’ is now used as a shorthand when someone tries to convince you that you cannot trust your own reality. Has anyone ever said ‘we never had that conversation?’; ‘I never said that to you?’; ‘I never agreed to that, you imagined it...’ well, that’s gaslighting.
On face value I suppose it can seem fairly innocuous, after all, we all have memory lapses, or selective deafness, and so overall one can tend not to notice it as anything other than slightly irritating. But if it’s used continually over a long period, it’s an insidious form of abuse, it destroys your self-confidence, it makes you fear for your sanity, and it can be so subtle that you hardly realize it’s happening. And it makes you afraid to confide in people because you are scared they will only confirm your fears. ‘Don’t be so silly.’ ‘I’m sure that didn’t really happen....’ ‘I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as all that...’
It does seem to me that it is very hard to prove you are not crazy,
when the seeds of doubt have been sown. If you are calm then you have disassociated, and if you are hysterical... well, enough said.
So I wanted to explore with The Nearest Thing to Crazy just how this could happen to a normal woman, in a supposedly safe, middle class environment, but also saddled with a history of something a lot of women have gone through: post-natal depression. How does the label of being a little bit unhinged affect your future? How far, and how effectively can it be used as a weapon against a fragile ego state. And how does it affect the power balance in relationships generally?
The fact that this kind of story is a recurring theme in women’s literature makes me wonder really how much we have changed since the ‘olden’ days. Remember Jane Eyre and poor mad Bertha, the wife in the attic; and Jean Rhys’s prequel, The Wide Sargasso Sea, contrasting the flamboyancy and colour of Bertha’s Caribbean upbringing with her incarceration in the freezing wilds of Yorkshire. The magnificent Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman – another mad woman in the attic. Wilkie Collins The Woman in White, locked away in a lunatic asylum. And then there is the perpetual favourite Rebecca where the methods used on the replacement Mrs de Winter are so subtle but nonetheless terrifying she reverts to a childlike state dominated by a Bluebeard of a husband. She is the invisible waif keeping to the shadows of Manderley while the dead Rebecca continues to assert her vibrancy and passion.
But not only did I want to distort my main character’s reality, or gaslight her, I wanted to see if it was possible to do the same with the reader. In The Nearest Thing to Crazy, I see the reader being asked to believe in three different acts of fiction. Centrally and most importantly is Cassandra’s story, who starts as a nameless narrator as an homage to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Ellie, like Rebecca,
breathes life and vibrancy into the plot, and I hope, through her stream of consciousness, talking to camera, story style is a device which helps to seduce the reader into believing her side of the story, at Cass’s expense. Her informal style is meant to be intimate, gossipy, and therefore seductively believable.
Another layer is added through the fact that Ellie is a novelist, and she is writing a novel which neither Cassandra nor the reader knows is based on truth or fiction. Indeed, it is made clear that it is a novel, and so must be a work of fiction, but of all the narrative strands, it is the one which Cass can test against her own reality, because it contains certain truths. So far, then, there are three separate self-consciously aware fictions within the novel, framed within a fourth which is, of course, the overall novel told my me.
And I hope, by seducing my readers into believing any of these stories, and to suspend the knowledge that they are merely reading words on a page about people who have never existed, I can in a small way demonstrate the wonderful power of fiction, and the true magic of imagination. And at the same time, show how terrifyingly easy it can be to distort someone’s reality.
Elizabeth Forbes 18th April 2013
1
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
(accessed 26.4.2012)
Contents
