Good Morning, Midnight: Jean Rhys (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I’ve always thought that must be exhausting, to be a woman and be expected to give every sleazy Tom, Dick and Harry your attention merely because they want it, to be forced to give it even in telling them to fuck off. There were moments when I'd be reading along and would have to stop after coming across amazing descriptions e. But a relative who recently died had left her some money, so she took it and got a room of her own—the room where she decided to drink herself to death.

Another passage that tells us more about the terrible mental state she is in: “People talk about the happy life, but that’s the happy life when you don’t care any longer if you live or die. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. Once hopeful that the marriage would be for all-time, in looking back, Sasha regards its end—with Enno’s abandonment of her after the (merciful) death of their infant son—as entirely foreseeable and inevitable. But she has armour: her cynical attitude, her devil-may-care façade that can usually be counted on to carry her through at least a bit of life’s insults, laughter, snide remarks – the easy things, a little hunger, lousy weather, a look from a man (or woman), something said under the breath but quite loud enough to be heard.There are some great lines, for example, things like “there must be the dark background to show up the bright colours. As does the luminol – a barbiturate, popular in the 1930’s, that was prescribed to combat insomnia and anxiety – she takes at night. She was previously living in London and trying to drink herself to death, but a friend couldn’t bear to see her in such a depressing state, so she lent her money and urged her to go to Paris, thinking she needed a change. One review skillfully highlights the contrast in how men and women navigate grief, drawing parallels with Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

This hostility that slits open her wounds and makes her crumble into the dampness of tears and pain. Mackenzie's stillborn turtle shell room walked into the river and came out without the turtle and a flat line reading from a long line of tired radio ad gig girls: "I'm back to where I started. She suffers in isolation and feels conjoined and yet detached with all that is damned and discarded and how this leads to an intensification of the loneliness she feels. Good Morning, Midnight is the story of a young woman’s plunge into depression and loneliness in the years following World War I.This is one of the great novels of alcoholism that I have read, as Jansen finds both release and embarrassment in her mash-together of days. Every word I say has chains around its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Two things stood out for me rather quickly ( besides hair, feelings of unworthiness, despair, loneliness, pain, authentic truth, and multitude of blows): I KNOW - isn’t that enough? Tomasulo argues that for her the underground is 'a fluid space of memory' where, by remembering through her body (pulling the past over her head like a blanket) she begins to undo her alienation from others. In 1966 she made a sensational comeback with her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, written in difficult circumstances over a long period.