Keith: The next story we are going to look at is "Alicia." Now, Alicia is about a young girl who is heavily affected by mental illness, and the story itself is more written as a remembrance by a younger sister of what her sister was like prior to the mental illness-and that took up probably, oh, a very small portion of the story. The rest of the story was about her recollections of her sister and things that she did when she was mentally ill-going to a psychiatric hospital, visiting her sister at a psychiatric hospital-and the effects it had on the family. Now, this story is put into the character portion of the anthology here that we're looking at, and I felt, personally, that although it's stuck in the character portion of the anthology, the characters themselves weren't necessarily developed all that well. My main question with regards to this story, and it's a fair way down on my list of questions to ask you, but I'll ask you now anyhow: Is there a conclusion of character in this story? Is Alicia a complete character? Now, in the writing-I mean, you had a little bit, small bits of description with regard to her appearance. Her eyes, and her eyebrows, and her appearance, and that was about it. The rest was just simply with regard to her mental illness, and in the end she dies. Now, do we really get to know the character Alicia, or is Alicia's sister really the one who's being developed in this story? I felt although the story was titled "Alicia," it was the sister's character that we learn more about, and its effects on her. Now, would anybody like to field this question?
Jill: I agree with you, I felt the story was more about the younger sister than about Alicia. However, I didn't think she was very well developed either. I don't recall ever learning her name, the younger sister's name. I didn't even know if she was, in fact, a boy or a girl, until quite a way through the story. So, it was definitely more about her and her feelings, her recollections of her childhood with her sister, but I don't think that any of the characters were very well developed. David: Yeah, I agree that they weren't well developed. I think perhaps it was the intention to have Alicia not be developed, because we are seeing her through the window of her sister, younger sister. In a sense, when we try to define a character, a person-I'm not saying this well, but she lacked everything that makes up a proper character or society, and had characteristics that made her wrong. Everything that she had, that made her effusive, was wrong. Everything-that she was quiet-was wrong. I think perhaps it might have been a character that was underdeveloped because the character was supposed to be underdeveloped. We're not supposed to know much about this person, and this is what we do with people of that kind. They're put away, and we know as little about them as possible. I don't know if I'm reading something into it-I'm trying to make like I wrote the story, I'm trying to make an excuse for it-but I appreciated the fact that maybe it's a character that should be vaguely sketched out a little bit. Keith: I kind of have the feeling that the character was vaguely sketched out, and we as readers had to sort of fill in the notions about what mental illness, what it's like. That sort of leads me to the next question: Can a mentally ill character, or mental illness, be accurately written about by somebody who isn't mentally ill? Now, Van Gogh had done a number of essays about himself and his mental illness, and the message of one of them-I can't remember the essay at the moment-but unless you're truly mentally ill, you can't write about it. Can a character be accurately characterized as somebody who is mentally ill by somebody who isn't? Or is it just sort of "window dressing" that we're reading? David: I'm a romanticist, and I think that a great writer can do that. I mean, that would be like saying-I'm not sure if it's equivalent to saying this-but that a great white writer can't write a great black character. That Robert Graves couldn't write I, Claudius because he was British and he wasn't Roman, that he lived 1900 years later. I think it could be done, I think a great writer could do these things. It certainly isn't going to be as genuine, but it might be a near-approximation of it. I think, in a sense, there's so many different degrees of mental illness. I think a slightly disturbed writer-and there were some brilliant disturbed writers, Hemingway being one-who could write beautifully. So, perhaps a non-mentally disturbed writer can write in schizophrenic terms.
Keith: Jill?
Jill: I was just going to say, I think with any writer to write about something, they need to do their research. So I think as long as somebody has put in the time and the effort to find out about the illness that they are writing about, and to maybe familiarize themselves with some people who are mentally ill, and just really spend a lot of time trying to understand what it's all about, then I think that they can write about it and probably be fairly accurate. I think if it was somebody who has zero experience with people with mental illness, or had really no knowledge and was just basing everything on stereotypes, then the story wouldn't be very good and wouldn't be a very accurate reflection. Keith: My biggest curiosity about this story is: Did Gabrielle Roy-was she writing this from experience, was she the little sister?
David: It did not cross my mind at all. Interesting, it didn't. Jill: Yeah, I wondered that as I was reading it, I wondered if she was the little sister or at least a family member in a situation like that.
Keith: Gabrielle Roy is a fairly senior character, it could perhaps be one of her own children that she was writing about. So, yeah, this is going to be a nagging question until I can find this lady's email and ask her. What did you like or dislike about the story? I was neither really absorbed about it until about the sixth-to-last paragraph, and it reads, "Alicia held me with her eyes. She looked at me intensely, smiled at me, found my name, even spoke to me. 'Little one, it's you. Where on Earth did you come from all by yourself?'" It was the point at which her sister was seriously mentally ill, and it was a moment of lucidity. She came back and sort of reaffirmed this child's loss of her sister-that she came back and was able to identify and reconnect with the sister. And then, as it reads, she died a few months later. It hit me in the heart, it was an emotional sort of catharsis, almost, that this child who's been lost without her sister has been able to reconnect. Although, it's a sad disconnect, where Alicia slips into her mental state again, but that moment, I think, was sort of a precious point in the book. So, the question going: What did you like or dislike about this story?
Jill: It was an okay story, I didn't strongly dislike it or anything, but it did evoke some emotion in me, probably closer to the end like you said, where you really did feel for the characters in the story. But other than that, it didn't do a whole lot for me. David: I think I like the quiet intimacy of the story, if I had to choose something about it that I liked. I would have liked to have seen extended scenes of them, and have a greater understanding of their relationship, and that further explored their relationship and the conversations that they would have. If they were further explored, I think it would be a very interesting story, and I think it would be a very interesting thing to- Keith: I personally felt what I would really like to have seen in this story was a development, or at least a flashback, to what the relationship was like prior to the mental illness, and develop that relationship so that the end of the story would be definitely more grabbing, more emotionally effective, had they developed the relationship with the two sisters more. I don't know whether that was done intentionally or what, but it's certainly something that we need to consider.
