{"id":1594,"date":"2017-09-24T13:08:03","date_gmt":"2017-09-24T17:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/?p=1594"},"modified":"2021-09-27T17:51:57","modified_gmt":"2021-09-27T21:51:57","slug":"the-drowning-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/the-drowning-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"The Drowning Girl: A Memoir"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Drowning Girl: A Memoir<\/em><\/a> is a fictional memoir of madness, haunting and loss written by Caitl\u00edn R. Kiernan. The novel was published in 2012 by Roc Books (an imprint of Penguin). It was nominated\u00a0for\u00a0the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. It won the Tiptree Award and the Bram Stoker Award.<\/p>\n

As you might suspect from all those award nominations, the novel is really good. I found something striking in nearly every paragraph. Trying to pick just one thing to focus on in my review was difficult, partly because it was like trying to pick the most valuable gold coin in a whole room full of dragon\u2019s loot, and partly because trying to separate everything out in this complex narrative is like trying to pull a single live octopus from an entire bucket of octopi: grab onto one slippery cephalopod and five more latch on and come with it.<\/p>\n

To paraphrase the narrator, India \u201cImp\u201d Morgan Phelps, the book isn\u2019t factual, but it\u2019s true.<\/p>\n

According to their Author\u2019s Note, Kiernan was initially inspired to write the novel after they read a nonfiction book on the Black Dahlia murder. They also reference and invoke the work of Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and dozens of other writers and poets. They do not mention Chambers\u2019 The King In Yellow<\/em>, but I could see its influence throughout the work, like snatches of a repeated motif barely audible in a layered, complex symphony.<\/p>\n

One of the many things that struck me about this novel is its structure. At first, poor mad Imp\u2019s story seems random, disjointed like her memory and mind. But then I came to realize that the narrative is very carefully constructed. Painstaking is the adjective that springs to mind. The structure of individual pages reflects the narrator\u2019s obsessive mindset; sentences and paragraphs move in circles and spirals:<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t realize I was also insane, and that I\u2019d probably always been insane, until a couple of years after Rosemary died. It\u2019s a myth that crazy people don\u2019t know they\u2019re crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people. Still, it simply hadn\u2019t occurred to me, that the way I saw the world meant that I had inherited \u201cthe Phelps Family Curse\u201d (to quote my Aunt Elaine, who has a penchant for melodramatic turns of phrase). Anyway, when it finally occurred to me that I wasn\u2019t sane, I went to see a therapist at Rhode Island Hospital. I paid her a lot of money, and we talked (mostly I talked while she listened), and the hospital did some tests. When all was said and done, the psychiatrist told me I suffered from disorganized schizophrenia, which is also called hebephrenia, for H\u0113b\u0113, the Greek goddess of youth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On a chapter level, the novel has a much more disciplined structure, even though Kiernan maintains the illusion of disorder in the spiraling narrative. For instance, once you boil down Chapter One, it is an introduction to all the characters, themes and the essentials of the story the reader is about to embark on. Chapter Two launches the plot as Imp meets her girlfriend Abalyn and things start to get strange. The whole plot progression from chapter to chapter is quite logical and deliberate if you look at it on a macro level.<\/p>\n

Kiernan changes things up in an interesting way by interspersing whole short stories written by the main character. The very first, \u201cThe Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean\u201d, is presented as being a fictional truth by the narrator. Its \u201coutsideness\u201d is emphasized by it not being labelled as a chapter but as an insert between Chapter Four and Chapter Five. Separating it from the rest of the narrative like that gives the impression to the reader that although Imp has just told us the story is true, it\u2019s still just something she made up out of her improperly medicated imagination and we shouldn\u2019t give it too much credence within this constructed reality. But \u201cMermaid\u201d more than anything else foreshadows and illuminates the presented-as-real events at the end of the book. It\u2019s a brilliant bit of intentional misdirection. You reach the end of the book and realize the truth of it was hiding in plain sight all along.<\/p>\n

In their Author\u2019s Note, Kiernan states that the structure of the narrative was partly based on the Neil Jordan film The Company of Wolves<\/em> and partly on Henryk G\u00f3recki\u2019s Symphony No. 3, Op. 36<\/em> (also known as The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs<\/em>). Kiernan says that the structural mirroring of The Company of Wolves<\/em> was unintentional until it was pointed out to them by their beta readers after the novel was complete; with the novel\u2019s dreamlike qualities, fairy tale narrative style and stories-within-stories structure, the resemblance is obvious. But I, too, missed it until they mentioned it in their note, even though it was right there in plain sight all along.<\/p>\n

I had not heard G\u00f3recki\u2019s Symphony before reading Kiernan\u2019s novel, but I did study music, and so I could see the structural resemblance to some kind of orchestral opus. I\u2019m glad to know what the model was. The symphony focuses on strings and a lone soprano and lacks the epic swell of percussion and horns that you\u2019d find in, say, a Wagnerian opera. The book\u2019s macro-structure mimics the three movements of the symphony. Imp could be seen as the novel\u2019s soprano, and in the book you\u2019ll find no fantasy battles or other loud scenes; everything is intimate and personal and centered on loss and the fear of loss.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written stories inspired by individual songs, but to use an entire symphony as the template for a novel? That\u2019s ambitious. I really admire this book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Drowning Girl: A Memoir is a fictional memoir of madness, haunting and loss written by Caitl\u00edn R. Kiernan. The novel was published in 2012 […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1599,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31],"tags":[107],"class_list":["post-1594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-kiernan"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/drowninggirl.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qT6f-pI","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":14902,"url":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/columbus-book-festival\/","url_meta":{"origin":1594,"position":0},"title":"Columbus Book Festival","author":"Lucy A. 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Snyder","date":"August 1, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Caitli\u0301n R. Kiernan\u2019s\u00a0The Red Tree\u00a0is a dizzying weird gothic novel that chronicles the final months of a writer named Sarah Crowe as she grieves for her dead girlfriend, wrestles with writer's block and tries to unravel the dark mysteries behind the legends surrounding an ancient oak tree growing near the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "dark fantasy"","block_context":{"text":"dark fantasy","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/category\/dark-fantasy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lucysnyder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/redtree.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1468,"url":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/unreliable-narrators\/","url_meta":{"origin":1594,"position":2},"title":"Unreliable Narrators","author":"Lucy A. Snyder","date":"July 20, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Caitl\u00edn R. Kiernan\u2019s dark fantasy novel The Drowning Girl: A Memoir\u00a0and Robert W. Chambers\u2019 supernatural story collection The King in Yellow\u00a0have several themes in common\u2014ancient malign gods, hauntings, and madness-inducing works of art, for instance\u2014but one of the most interesting is how the two authors handle unreliable narrators. 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