I’m nearly thirty years old now and I’ve been working here since I was twenty-one. Bob, the owner, took me on not long after the office opened. I suppose he felt sorry for me. I had a degree in Classics and no work experience to speak of, and I turned up for the interview with a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm. Maybe he sensed, back then, that I would never aspire to anything more than a poorly paid office job…Perhaps he could also tell that I’d never need to take time off to go on honeymoon, or request maternity leave.
Two things are going on here in what is the second paragraph on the first page of first chapter. This is introductory, the thing most writers hate writing more than anything else: exposition. The first thing to take note of is Eleanor’s characterization of herself. It is relentlessly self-denigrating. Notice how she projects her own sense of low self-esteem onto Bob as she shifts suspicions about worthlessness as suitable material for a wife and mother onto her employer. Then there is matter-of-fact way she mentions her physical appearance without any attempt at context or explanation as if she just assumes that people won’t care about the details of why she physically appears to have recently been involved in some sort of traumatic confrontation.
The second thing to notice, of course, is that perhaps she is right to make this presumption. There is no indication, after all, that Bob shows any particular interest. Of course, we only have her recollection of this interview and perhaps she simply doesn’t care to share the empathetic portion of the interview where Bob expresses his concern. Only time will tell.
“Now, you listen to me, Eleanor. Under no circumstances are you to discuss your childhood with anyone, especially not a so-called ‘counselor.’ Do you hear me? Don’t you dare. I’m warning you, Eleanor. If you start down that path, do you know what will happen? Do you know what I’ll do? I’ll—"
Eleanor is seeing a therapist to deal the childhood trauma which informs the lonely, solitary existence. A fire claimed her younger sister and left her face scarred by her efforts to save her. But her heart and soul are also scarred and flames can reach those organs through the protective covering shielding them. Eleanor has a weekly appointment with her mother and their fifteen minute telephone calls exercises in maternal manipulation, revealing a daughter whose adult circumstances originated in the womb of another person. While memories of the fire and the loss of her sister infuse Eleanor’s sessions with her therapist, eventually it becomes impossible not to take notice of the fact that it is never brought up in the conversations with her mother. After this outburst, Eleanor observes that while Mummy is almost always scary, this is the first time she herself ever sounded scared.
Some people in the crowd laughed. Some people shouted insults. The singer retorted with an obscene gesture. I realized with uncompromising clarity that the man onstage before me was, without any doubt, an arse. The band started their next song and everyone was jumping up and down and I then was at the bar, requesting a double.
For the first half of the book, Eleanor is in love. So in love that she undergoes a completely physical transformation as for the first time in her adult life she starts to care about how she presents herself to the world. The object of her affection is someone she only knows from afar: local rock star Johnnie Lomond. Although Eleanor says she has been diagnosed with clinical depression, her behavior in this instant really seems far closer, symptomatically, to Borderline Personality Disorder. Eleanor, never having actually met Johnnie, has put him on a pedestal and created this fantasy where it will be love at first sight when she sees her.
She has invested the local celebrity with a kind of magic: he will be the one to fix her life and make her normal. But the relationship never get to that point. As he goes about his performance, recognition of the truth about the fantasy of her love for Johnnie dawns and acceptance hits hard, but is manageable because the revelation comes with the admission that he would never find anything worthy about her. At that point depression hits hard. Which is normal and to be expected. But a little later all of that floods away in an instant when Johnnie—still desirable just a few second before—suddenly turns his back to the crowd, drops his pants and moons the audience and the manner in which it now become she who topples him from pedestal, steps upon him with her foot and crushes him into meaningless is a defining act of the Borderline personality; it is an act that manifests an essential diagnostic necessity.
