My Phantoms, Gwendoline Riley, author; Hannah Curtis, narrator
This is such a tenderly told tale of a family forced to come to grips with their relationships, past and present, as terminal illness and death loom. They have to explore their feelings and the reasons for them as they react to the current trauma. Was their behavior justified? Bridget is forced to face her own life as she now must deal with her mother’s, and as she relates little anecdotal moments, the reader gets a picture of the way the family interacts with each other.
Bridget’s mother is Helen Grant. Once her family had lived in Venezuela where her father was a photographer for the Shell Oil Chemical Company. Helen pretty much married to escape her home which was anything but peaceful for her. As she puts it, though, she left home and married simply because that was what was done at that time. Helen was born in 1945 and seemed to consider herself a child of the 60’s. She loved to travel. Eventually, she had two children. One, a very devoted daughter, Michelle; the other, Bridget, who is very angry and resentful and has hardly seen her mother since she left home, a home which was not a happy place for her.
Helen, called Hen because of how she pronounced her name as she learned to talk, seems self-absorbed or, perhaps, even distracted. The children’s father, Lee Grant, seems passive-aggressive, perhaps, even cruel at times. Hen eventually leaves him. Bridget, eventually also leaves her family, as Helen did, and she rarely looks back. She, like her mother, found peace leaving home.
Although Helen kept busy, she was rarely content; she often complained, and had two failed marriages. Bridget and Michelle are both unmarried, living with partners, and have no children. Bridget leaves the care of her mother to her sister and rarely helps out or shows up, unless it is an emergency.
As Bridget tells the story, almost in a conversation with the reader, her anger and disappointment with her parents reveals itself. Her mother’s sarcasm and passive-aggression come alive. They both seem to quietly torment each other. It seems that some personality traits have passed on through the generations.
The author has captured the intense relationships of the family members and explores the subtle evidence of their frustration with each other, their anger that sometimes seems to seethe below the surface, and the way they deal with each other. Michelle is the devoted daughter who steps in to help all the time, apparently without resentment. She and her partner care for her mother, seemingly willingly, though there is no way that Bridget would take on the same responsibility,anyway. She has resisted even introducing her mother to her partner, David, for years.
As the three family members are explored in detail, only one seems likeable to me, since she is somewhat sympathetic, another somewhat self absorbed, and the final one marches to her own drummer. The events and the reasons that have created their personalities dance across the page. This seems like a family tortured by dysfunctional relationships that never morphed into better ones until it seemed to be too late. Their secrets and inability to deal with the reality of their situation became a larger reality when Hen developed a brain tumor and lost even more of her lackluster comprehension of the real world.
The narrator is superb, capturing every nuance of the conversations taking place with the appropriate emphasis and emotion that takes the reader right into the moment, right into a kind of quiet emotional experience that seems ready to erupt into a maelstrom. The author explores the relationships subtly but very insightfully as she illustrates the behavior of the characters and the reasons for that behavior.