![]() But he spanked Martha too and so did their mother – to them it was standard childrearing practice. He certainly spanked her when she defied him, taking her over his knee. With her father, it’s harder: could he really have molested Christina? A school janitor made a pass at her when she was 13 and it seems she projected that offence on to her Dad. And she pushes herself to the borders of psychobabble in her efforts to understand (“That Christina felt stabbed in the I makes sense to me”). But she’s patient, as the mediator, when Christina scorns and refuses to speak to their mother. She’s bemused at how their upbringing could have made her sister think that their parents belonged to a circle of Nazi paedophiles. She felt the less favoured of the two children: the daughter their mother indulged and most wanted to please was Christina, “in whom she saw herself”. “ Familiar is a word I allow,” Christina wrote in her journal (only parts of which Martha can bear to read), “ Family is not.” At three, her mother stabbed her in the eye with a needle – or so Christina believes, convinced that the operation she had for a wandering eye was merely a cover. ![]() But in the long third essay Christina’s suicide drives her back to childhood to reassess them.īaillie knows she’ll never find out why a shared childhood should have had such different outcomes Martha remembers both parents fondly, recalling how her mother professed “I love you always” and presenting her father as a kindly man devoted to trees and animal welfare. The first essay recounts the death of her mother, an artist, at the age of 99 the second looks back on the life of her father, a mathematics professor, who was “rescued from loneliness” when he married at 41. “Were life a cartoon, being punched by the death of a person you love would make you see stars,” she writes it’s “the sweeping tug of a train entering a station, attempting to draw everyone from the platform”. Death is its starting point and the source of its best aphorisms. The book is a trilogy of essays about an ordinarily dysfunctional middle-class family, “a dog chasing its own tail”. But it was the third reason that weighed on Martha, who’d been the one keen to sell the family house in Toronto, despite Christina telling her, in front of a psychiatrist: “If I’m forced to leave the house as soon as Mom dies, you’ll just find a body.” By “The Juniper Tree” she meant a Brothers Grimm fairytale in which a child is killed by one parent and fed in a stew to the other, much as Christina felt she had been, believing herself to be a victim of domestic abuse. ![]() The schizophrenia went a long way back she’d first attempted suicide in her 20s. ![]() On the wall, in blue marker, she’d written three reasons for wanting to die: “Because of schizophrenia / Because of The Juniper Tree / Because of losing the house”. The sister of Canadian novelist Martha Baillie, Christina, killed herself at 61. When someone you love takes their own life, guilt is unavoidable when they hold you responsible, guilt is off the scale. ![]()
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