Thankfully, Mary let us become closer with the rest of her family within the next few chapters of The Liar's Club. What really stood out to me is the middle paragraph on page forty-nine, "And from that silence in your skull there will develop--almost chemically, like film paper doused in that magic solution--a snapshot of cold horror. " She says this trying to forget "an ugly illness," even though it's difficult to block that from memory. Whenever you would see something awful happen, people try to cope with pretending it never existed, even though you will still suffer from it. Mary never really experienced what suffering was until she saw Grandma after having mustard gas piped into her leg to decrease the melanoma; this, surprisingly, really impacted Mary. "Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it,(49)" further explains that it isn't possible for someone to try to hide away their suffering or make something painful look pleasing. As we read on, Mary's mother is found to have hid her suffering with "blank" stares and with little emotion, which is the opposite of the message of this specific passage.
A family event that comes to mind is this past Christmas. My parents, my two brothers, and I drove to Pittsburgh to have a type of Christmas "lunner" with my two uncles, brother, and grandmother. We were relaxing in my uncles' living room and somehow we got to watching Sydney White, which is a modern based Snow White that took place on a college campus. We were watching it on their fancy big screen television with many little trinkets on the coffee table and side tables that my Uncle Marc bought off ebay (Which is funny, because he's obsessed with frogs; he has a pond in his backyard--which takes up almost all of his backyard--and has little statues of frogs). We were watching the movie, and there was a funny part of the movie where the "Seven dwarfs" in the movie were looking at a hanging sports bra and they were all baffled by it. We were all laughing and having a good time; it was like everything just went away as we batted all the problems we were having with my grandmother growing ill and all the financial stuff, out of the park as it felt like we hit a homerun into happiness.
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Rebecca,
ReplyDeleteI, too, am compelled by the line about real suffering and what we sometimes try to "drape" over it. Do you see Karr avoiding any of her suffering even while she reveals things that would make most of us blanch? In the first chapter she told us she was going to keep some things to herself and in what we read for today she mentions that she had forgotten many details for 19 years. Does she have a kind of PTSD?
Why do we drape?
Interestingly, in your family event, you mention the thing that is hurtful only at the end (sorry there's been sickness by the way...my grandma's been in the hospital for a month or so and it's hard). In a sense, this movie was a kind of drape, right? I leave you with this; human beings are an extraordinary species with extraordinary coping mechanisms.
I like the passage you pick to talk about, it has a lot to do with the book, and how Karr is telling the story. It seems like Karr wants to tell the story as if it was our own, and we were remembering it.
ReplyDeleteThe film paper quote was and excellent one to talk about. It gives you a very interesting perspective on as to what's going on in the passage and it also stuck out in my mind while i was reading.
ReplyDeleteYour descriptions are vivid with color. I get a perfect image of your entire family all huddled around watching this movie intently, then suddenly this funny break in the movie causes everyone to become animated with laughter expressing their own true character.
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