Book club & reading group notes, Pieces of a Girl
Notes by Robyn Sheehan-Bright. Click to skip to:
Thematic and plot summary
Questions for discussion: writing style
Questions for discussion: general
‘I am a finder of lies to lay upon a page.’ (p 13) This is a novel which slowly and skilfully unravels a story like a skein of wool; or the peeling back of skin to reveal the skeleton beneath. A woman coming to terms with her mother’s deranged obsessions, and her childhood mental torment at her hands, unveils the strange form of subterfuge perpetrated on a child by her mother, so ‘That her secret and my guard of it is inside my breath, my blood, my bone.’ (p 107-8)
The narrative alternates between the adulthood and childhood of the central character, Ivy, who is a thirty-one year old photo-researcher whose relationship with her mother, June, has left her deeply wounded. When she meets Professor Linford Walford at a book launch, she quickly agrees to marry him, despite the fact that her feelings are ambivalent, and that he knows next to nothing about her. Their subsequent marriage is founded (as we discover gradually) on Ivy’s need for a form of security. She is a damaged and damaging woman. Though to complicate matters, Ivy does not hate, but feels a sense of loss for the charismatic June. Victor, the man who boarded with them and eventually discovered their terrible secret, understands what Ivy feels, for he too was wounded. But only Ivy can find what she really needs, and how to save herself. She searches amongst photographs, many of them gruesome dissections of the body, hoping to discover the secret to herself, to her past, and to her future. Ivy’s last contact with her mother is to visit her house when she and Victor read her death notice. It is this visit which gives her the key she needs to unlock the door; to finally escape from the prison in which she and Victor have been locked for almost twenty years.
Entrapment often creates a passion for containment in its victims. ‘She holds me to myself.’(p 45) Prisoners yearn for jail; women in abusive situations yearn for their partners; tormented children try to re-create a situation in which they are caught again, for they fear ‘the terrible brightness of freedom.’(p 143) Parental influence is a particular theme here, with Linford just as much bound to his mother as Ivy is to hers. ‘I am competing with my mother-in-law. I am thirty-one years old. I am a silent joke of no consequence.’ (p 110) Ivy accepts Linford although from their first date she has ‘a hollow dragging sensation’ (p 20) and on the second,shefeels that ‘the windows seal us in’(p 22), in his car. She seems to need the closed and exitless world he offers her.
Freedom and fear of freedom are a constant thematic interplay here. ‘For how much outside world does one woman need?’(p 168) Ivy’s responses to her mother’s treatment of her are ambivalent, as are those of many people caught in a web of confused allegiances. Her fear was tinged with fascination, for her mother’s strangeness was dangerous but also exciting. She ‘flashes like a parrot’ (p 28) and has ‘ red cotton flowers that tumble over her breasts’ ( p 12). Ivy is entranced by her glittering beauty; she is the ‘bad mother’ who attracts admiring glances; she is always exciting, and she makes Ivy complicit in the ‘secret’, and therefore powerful in her integral role in keeping the ‘secret’ hidden. Ivy is trapped by her love for her, and perhaps Victor is, as well.
Secrets and lies hidden beneath the surface of things are another thematic thread. The skin hides things, and so do words. ‘ I wonder at all the daily lies a person utters without pause. I wonder at the fibrous coils and whorls of truth that lie beneath the skin of all our words.’ (p 48) Ivy is attempting to uncover but also to cover up the secret of her past. She wants to understand hermother, but also to forget her. She was flayed by her, and has sought all her life to wrap herself in some protective covering, like the invented skin her mother made her wear for twelve years. ‘Wrapskin, it is called, when she swathes me in the clothes of a boy…It is our own language, succulent in our mouths, it is our own ritual, our private history. I will carry my wrapskin inside myself every day of my life.’ (p 36) Victor experienced the same sensation; that June was capable of laying him bare, ‘he thinks it’s him she’s peeling back slowly, so slowly,’(p 86). He, like Ivy, was emotionally scarred and has lived a somewhat barren existence ever since.
Photographs yield secrets too, and can be used to hide reality, as much as to interpret it. ‘In my pictures there are only straight teeth, knife-sharp trouser creases, lush lawns and well-groomed pets.” (p 14) Ivy’s obsessive scouring of Linford’s slide collection is a means of finding the truth.
Similarly, disguises and camouflages symbolise the concept of what lies beneath the ordinary surface of our lives. Ivy is wrapped by her mother, and by Linford’s mother –in clothes for her wedding. She takes on the role of wife by dressing, just as she took on the role of a boy. But Ivy’s ability to maintain a disguise gradually wilts and Linford’s death cracks the mask she is wearing once and for all.
Medical imagery is strong, too. The skin is a shell which contains secrets. Cells are to be examined and probed; bones are to be x-rayed; scientific certainties present an obsessive fantasy for Ivy. She hopes to defuse the power of memory by declaring that memories are only cells too. Metaphors of wounding and healing are part of this medical imagery. ‘My mother dressing me to dress the wounds I’ve made inside her.’ (p 33) June’s conviction that her daughter’s life was an injury to her own, injured not only her daughter, but also Victor. ‘I feel the slump of my mother’s promise starting to break inside him.’(p 123) They need each other because as Ivy says, ‘ my mother cauterised his blooming wounds as she cauterised mine.’ (p 176) Both have been unable to feel for others since.
Cancer may be viewed as a late twentieth century metaphor for emotional deprivation. Ivy’s mother is obsessed with warding it off, inventing complicated remedies such as wrapping herself in vinegar-soaked muslin or sleeping with a magnet in her pillow case. Her obsession with its possible presence in her body makes her every action an elaborate ritual to purge herself of its evil contaminants. Eating is another metaphor for well-being and ill health. June believes Ivy has sapped her strength. ‘I edge her towards her death,’ (p 50). ‘I was a glutton for my mother’s life,” (p 53). She was determined to eat her own daughter’s existence away, to take pieces of her bit by bit until there was very nearly nothing left. She literally fed upon her daughter’s strength, and spirit. Metaphors of internment are also used to denote Ivy’s entrapment, ‘This is how she buries me, in fabric, in crew-cuts, in the cold grey colours of men,’ (p 77). The sexual ambivalence created by this strange camouflage has made her emotionally removed. “I am species-less, amoebic, unformed as an oyster.’ (p 175) Drowning is another form of burial used to denote her precarious existence. ‘I am wearing the expression of someone watching herself drown.’ (p 165) And references to water also relate to amniotic fluid and to Ivy’s birth for which her mother blamed her; accused her of taking from her, her womanhood, her beauty, her health.
Contrasting opposites such as light and dark; weightlessness and weight are another device used to explore themes and characters. ‘Could we ever have had lives as light and clear as that bare room?’(p 34) The moments of ‘lightness’ make the dark things more bearable. Ivy’s memories of her mother are of someone billowing, ‘When she walked she floated, and I was heavy as a stone beside her, holding her down.’ (p 4) Such images are juxtaposed creating a dramatic tension to be resolved in later chapters. The characters are engaged in a theatrical dance around each other, appearing on ‘sets’ of their own making. When Ivy first visits Linford’s house she says it’s got ‘A film-set staircase’ but he says dismissively that it’s, ‘A family home.’(p 25)
Ivy is adept at role-playing, from her early training, and willingly acquiesces in becoming what Linford needs. ‘there is a kind of silent balletic beauty in the precision of our collusion.’ (p 36) Hence she constructs her married life as an elaborate drama too. ‘I pretend I am dwelling in a cathedral’(p 51). When Linford goes on his scientific adventures researching Orang Utans, she imagines him as a sort of Tarzan, ‘my jungle husband, the treetop lunging, vineswinging swashbuckler.’ (p 52), to her Jane. When she returns, the ‘play’ is modified and she becomes simply, ‘a proper wife.’ (p52) There is nothing natural about Ivy’s responses; they are calculated to make herself invisible, and her motives and feelings undetectable. She has learned from a past master, who played roles and forced others to ‘play’ with her. ‘My mother promised him Scarlett O’Hara, but I think he is beginning not to feel so much like Rhett Butler any more.’ (p 122) Ivy was entranced by her mother’s performances, and has tried to emulate her theatricality. Both live in fear of their charade being exposed; June fled from her own discovery, and Ivy is still desperately clinging to the script.
Gardens also represent a thematic device and when the boy-girl has to choose a name, it’s Ivy. There is a juxtaposition between the earth (or soil) as nurturer and as tomb or grave. She wants to plant herself in something safe and fertile, and yet she is obsessed with collecting anatomical photographs, ‘mapping her own decomposition.’ (p 162) She tries desperately to piece together ‘the pieces of a girl’ whom she once was, but she knows that it is the woman she is now that matters. Her final passionate affair with Victor is an attempt to reclaim her childhood and her mother. But ultimately she learns that she has to reject the past. This novel is about arresting decay; about healing, reclaiming and regenerating a spirit before it’s too late.
Questions for discussion: writing style & techniques
1. This writer give up secrets sparingly, tantalising the reader with hints to the meaning she divulges only gradually. Chapter One is a masterful example of this technique, in which enigmatic glimpses accrete into a depiction of the scene and a summary of the plot and characters. The words ‘My son.’(p 29) are a stunning climax to the undercurrents suggested earlier. Did this technique enhance your reading or would you prefer a less guarded revelation of plot?
2. The emotions of characters are evoked by using inanimate objects. e.g. flywire doors, whose ‘doleful screeches are the only sound covering my mother’s indifference to neighbourliness and the length of front yard grass.’(p 13) gives an impression of Ivy’s uncomfortable childish awareness of her mother’s removedness. And , ‘Linford had clasped me like a bag of golf clubs at his side’ (p 37) indicates his sense of ownership of her.Similarly, ‘My wedding dress clings to me like lichen.’ (p40)implies that her potential marriage is a suffocating concept and yet she calls Linford ‘my earth, my rock, my leap-offable cliff.’ (p142) suggesting that she has turned to him for security. Discuss the meaning conveyed by other similar phrases.
3. Structurally this novel plays backwards and forwards between Ivy’s present and past. How did this affect your reading?
4. Metaphors predominate - of food, burial, medicine, light, gardens. Find and discuss some of them.
5. Fairytale allusions are a powerful device for translating feelings into action. e.g. ‘I am to be entombed in a cupboard by my husband.’ (p 70) refers to Bluebeard’s chamber. The word ‘Wrapskin’ is reminiscent of the tale of ‘Catskin’. Discuss the function of such allusions.
6. Humour and lightheartedness is used to alleviate the novel’s sombre aspects, and to create empathy with characters. e.g. the exchanges with the conservative neighbours, the Cutlers, are very amusing. When Mrs Cutler quizzes Victor about the length of their lawn he confesses to ignorance about lawnmowers, ‘Do those things use kero, or petrol?’(p 63) When June is challenged, there is a nice, affectionate ‘tongue-in-cheek’ satire of their ordinary suburban preoccupations, ‘both of us embarrassed at the lushness of my mother’s grass.’ (p13)When Victor falls asleep on the train, a woman mistakes him for a vagrant and pins a dollar to his coat, for food, ‘My mother and Victor screeched and hiccupped…screaming out ‘Beef tea! Broth!’ and collapsing over the table again with their giggles.’(p 56) When he gets a job delivering catalogues, he burns them in the backyard incinerator. And when Linford quizzes Ivy about cleaning products she is obviously completely in the dark, ‘I think you’ll find the thinking’s changed on cream cleansers. The gel is not so damaging to enamel.’(p 87) There is also a lot of ‘playfulness’ and hysterical enjoyment. e.g. Victor and Ivy making the paella; June and Ivy dancing, ‘We spin around our kitchen, we leap and swoop against the cupboards and laugh and laugh…’(p 22) The book is thus imbued with Ivy’s sense of loss for, and fond memories of June despite her abandonment. Discuss.
Questions for discussion: general
1. ‘My husband will become earth in which to plant myself,’ (p 39). Does Linford give Ivy the security she craves?
2. Or is Ivy’s obsession with security a suicidal impulse? Is she hoping to find peace by ‘jumping off the cliff’ of her loveless marriage? Does Linford’s death force her to confront her real self?
3. ‘I held her down.’ (p 4) Is guilt one of the predominant techniques used by those who abuse others to achieve their own ends?
4. ‘Illusion is not difficult for me.’ (p 52) Is illusion a quality which comes naturally to everyone.
5. ‘It was the cold thrill of this first escape that led him into solo expeditions in the jungle,’ (p 57). Do childhood experiences shape our lives?
6. ‘Victor could not have my mother,…But he could have me.’ (p171) Does Victor care for Ivy as a substitute for, or to save her from, June? Is his action in caring for her really just for himself?
7. Societal demand for perfection is suggested by Ivy’s photo research. Was June a victim of such expectations or purely of her own self-obsessiveness? Is June’s a compulsive disorder, or did she suffer some physical effect from childbirth? Were there any further clues to what ails her?
8. How realistic did you find Ivy’s situation? Does society hide fractured people like June?
9. What does Ivy seek amongst the slides?
10. Are Linford and his mother a damaged couple like June and Ivy?
11. What is Linford looking for in Ivy do you think?
12. Do you think the ending is hopeful? In abandoning Victor is Ivy setting herself free from the past, or is she letting go of her last form of life support?