I have an aunt who is now ninety years old. She no longer knows my name and how we are connected. During my recent visit, my uncle asked her whether she knew who Swee Lan was . She laughed a little and said
“ Swee Lan? Of course I know.Swee Lan is my older sister, how can I not know
who she is?” Swee Lan is the name of my late mother.
The layout of my aunt’s house has not changed since I first stepped into the house as a child, the same living room, the same old long mahogany table that has been sitting in the centre hall, the same round dining table sitting on the mosaic tiles floor at the back of the house where there is plenty of light and space. The additions are the pictures on the wall. She has six children and all of her grandchildren’s graduation photographs hang on the wall in an orderly manner and you could smell youth from their smiles that dazzle and shine. My aunt's grandchildren live abroad and when they visit her, she does not have any recollection of who they are. For all her life,my aunt has played the traditional role of a daughter, wife and mother like most women in her generation who do not think too much about their identity. From the little that I know, Alzheimer patients remember things from the past as their memory degenerates like a tape erasing its recording in a reverse order.
I want to keep only the good memories and forget unhappy or unpleasant incidents but it is not possible to pretend that they have never happened. Incidents stay in your mind in the way you want to remember them, often even bad memories do not seem so bad as time goes by. If one is inclined to think negatively, unhappy memories may turn into some kind of plague that cause distress.
My reading is not sporadic but my choices of books are random. A couple of weeks ago , I read The Imperfectionists written by Tom Rachman and the setting is in Rome. Then I started reading Lady Oracle, again the setting is in Rome. What coincidence. I had been meaning to read Margaret Atwood’s stories and I am glad that I started with Lady Oracle.
I want to keep only the good memories and forget unhappy or unpleasant incidents but it is not possible to pretend that they have never happened. Incidents stay in your mind in the way you want to remember them, often even bad memories do not seem so bad as time goes by. If one is inclined to think negatively, unhappy memories may turn into some kind of plague that cause distress.
My reading is not sporadic but my choices of books are random. A couple of weeks ago , I read The Imperfectionists written by Tom Rachman and the setting is in Rome. Then I started reading Lady Oracle, again the setting is in Rome. What coincidence. I had been meaning to read Margaret Atwood’s stories and I am glad that I started with Lady Oracle.
Lady Oracle is about Joan Foster who has faked her own death and she is constantly running away from her past and difficult situations. The book begins with her escape to an Italian hill town to take stock of her life. She is married to Arthur
who had not known much about her past but one thing that she has told him was that
her mother had named her after Joan Crawford. Joan narrates,
‘This is one of the things that
always puzzled me about her. Did she name me after Joan Crawford because she
wanted me to be like the screen characters she played- beautiful, ambitious, ruthless, destructive to men - or because she wanted me to be successful? Joan Crawford worked hard, she had willpower, she
built herself up from nothing, according to my mother.’
‘When I was eight or nine and
my mother would look at me and say musingly, ‘To think that I named you after
Joan Crawford,’ my stomach would contract and plummet and I would be overcome
with shame; I knew I was being reproached, but I’m still not sure what for.
There’s more than one side to Joan Crawford, though. In fact there was
something tragic about Joan Crawford, she had big serious eyes, an unhappy
mouth and high cheekbones, unfortunate things happened to her. Perhaps that was
it. Or , and this is important: Joan Crawford was thin.’
Joan thinks that
one of the things that her mother never approved of her was her size as she was
fat as a child and also as a young adult.
In Joan’s voice,
Atwood wrote,
‘ The war between myself and my
mother was on in earnest ; the disputed territory was my body.’
‘I can never remember calling
her anything but Mother, never one of those childish diminutives; I must have,
but she must have discouraged it. Our
relationship was professionalized early. She was to be the manager, the
creator, the agent;I was to be the product. I suppose one of the most important
things she wanted from me was gratitude. She wanted
me to do well, but she wanted to be responsible for it.’
Joan’s mother ‘ was an attractive woman, even
into her late thirties, she had kept her figure, she had been popular in her
youth.’
As
Joan is growing up, there are two key female characters in her life. Joan’s
mother was unhappy and unfulfilled. Joan’s dad was an anaesthetist at the
Toronto General Hospital .She had met Joan’s dad when she was a waitress at a
resort in Muskoka. Joan’s father happened to drop by the resort to visit a
friend. For the most time of Joan’s childhood, her dad was an absence. The
memorable time of her life was spent with Aunt Lou, her dad’s sister who lived
alone, a self- sufficient and independent woman. Aunt Lou gives Joan the opportunity
to be herself. In one of her
daydreams, Joan has imagined that Aunt Lou is her biological mother.
In Joan's voice, Atwood wrote,
' You can't change the past, Aunt Lou used to say. Oh, but I wanted to;that was the one thing I really wanted to do. Nostalgia convulsed me.'
Joan becomes a gothic romance writer and she finds her escape in creating different characters through the heroines in the stories she is writing. Lady Oracle is essentially about the protagonist’s quest to self-discovery through the different relationships she has as a grown up and how her childhood encounters and growing up experience have impacted her.
In Joan's voice, Atwood wrote,
' You can't change the past, Aunt Lou used to say. Oh, but I wanted to;that was the one thing I really wanted to do. Nostalgia convulsed me.'
Joan becomes a gothic romance writer and she finds her escape in creating different characters through the heroines in the stories she is writing. Lady Oracle is essentially about the protagonist’s quest to self-discovery through the different relationships she has as a grown up and how her childhood encounters and growing up experience have impacted her.