The story follows Sofia, greco-english only daughter, and full-time carer. The sea-called girl spends her days tending to her mother’s demanding psychosomatically unresponsive feet, wheeling them around from doctor to doctor, to our book’s setting: a wacky recuperation retreat in spain. 

She is a daughter who is burdened by a mother whom she loves, but does not respect. 

The other she is a mother, believed by no one and immovably fixed onto her loneliness, berating her only friend in life. 

Let me venture for a second into a bit of a thinky exploration!

Chronic illness is where the large interest of this book begins. Being sick is kind of a personal experience. But, anyone stuck in the social spiderweb is swept into the experience with the ill. It’s not a selfish demand, it’s more like a self-oriented requirement for healing. Communities reconstruct themselves around the ill. I’ll take care of your dog, you cover my shift at work, and so it goes. But that’s temporary movement, it’s a tide, not a tectonic shift. 

A chronic illness is more demanding on its environment, and those demands are so often unmet.  It’s like grief in that way. It’s so long and constant, but what your web is capable of is often overwhelming and too short-lived.

So, to have a psychosomatic chronic illness is kind of like the most logical madness. People say that madness is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.  If that is true, then chronic illness seems to be the maddeningly unrealistic expectation that feeling the same pain again and again should yield the same reaction forever: Everlasting consistent levels of pity, love, and support. 

I can’t remember quite where I was going with this. Something about guilt and caring for others and being depended on. I’m the youngest.  I am however big enough to admit, I don’t know nearly enough about those things. But this is what reading is! An exercise in empathy. And, on one’s best days, doing something with that empathy, to make things better for someone else. 

I guess I just want to explain the feeling that this book left me with, which was basically: subjectivity. Is Sofia’s mother’s pain “true”? Does it matter? Yes./? How much? It Depends. That’s what I loved about finishing this book!

And –  I won’t spoil the ending but –  it’s made infinitely more affecting by Deborah’s writing choices! The unspoken complexity Deborah gifts her characters. She doesn’t manipulate the 1st person narrative, to push Sofia to believe any one thing about her mother. She does not have Sofia insult the truth by pretending to know it personally. Or adjudicate her mother’s wounds, physical or mental. Instead you are guided by Deborah to consider someone who just doesn’t know what she deserves. Someone who feels an urge to break free from a tyrant, and also the urge to defend them fervently. 

Anyways, a great book, if you let yourself think about it. A good book, if you just like to read about people.