Blurb:
Alicia –
Alicia Berenson writes in her diary as a release, an outlet – and to prove to her beloved husband that everything is fine. She can’t bear the thought of worrying Gabriel, or causing him pain.
Until late one evening, Alicia shoots Gabriel five times and then never speaks another word
Theo –
Forensic psychotherapist Theo Faber is convinced he can successfully treat Alicia, where all other have failed. Obsessed with investigating her crime, his discoveries suggest Alicia’s silence goes far deeper than he first thought.
And if she speaks, would he want to hear the truth?
Rating: 5/5 stars
Side Notes:
- References to murder, death, suicide, self-harm, alcohol and drugs
- Suitable for older readers (16 years and up)
- Very intimidating
- Major plot twists all throughout the story
Book Quotes:
- I don’t know why I’m writing this. That’s not true. Maybe I do know, and just don’t want to admit it to myself
- He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
- Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband.
- Alicia never spoke again
- Her enduring silence turned this story from a commonplace domestic tragedy into something far grander: a mystery, an enigma that gripped the headlines and captured the public imagination for months to come.
- The monstrous lack of remorse of a col-blooded killer.
- Perhaps. But let us not forget that while Alicia Berenson may be a murderer, she was also an artist. It makes perfect sense – to me at least – that she would pick ip her brushes and paints, and express her complicated emotions on canvas. No wonder that, for once, painting came to her with such ease; if grief can be called easy.
- But I’m going too fast. I’m getting ahead of myself. I must start at the beginning and let events speak for themselves. I mustn’t colour them, twist them or tell any lies.
- I started at the painting, staring into Alicia’s face, trying to interpret the look in her eyes, trying to understand – but the portrait defied me. Alicia stared back at me – a blank mask – unreadable, impenetrable. I could divine neither innocence nor guilt in her expression.
- As a psychotherapist, it was obvious to me that she had suffered a severe trauma surrounding Gabriel’s death; and this silence was manifestation of that trauma. Unable to come to terms with what she had done, Alicia stuttered and cam to a halt, like a broken car. I wanted to help start her up again – help Alicia tell her story, to heal and get well. I wanted to fix her
- …we often mistake love for fireworks – for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm – and constant.
- “Choosing a lover is a lot like choosing a therapist. We need to ask ourselves, is this someone who will be honest with me, listen to criticism, admit making mistakes, and not promise the impossible?”
- “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways. —SIGMUND FREUD”
- “You know, one of the hardest things to admit is that we weren’t loved when we needed it most. It’s a terrible feeling, the pain of not being loved.”
- “We’re all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.”
- “There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other”
- “We are made up of different parts, some good, some bad, and a healthy mind can tolerate this ambivalence and juggle both good and bad at the same time. Mental illness is precisely about a lack of this kind of integration – we end up losing contact with the unacceptable parts of ourselves.”
- “Somehow grasping at vanishing snowflakes is like grasping at happiness: an act of possession that instantly gives way to nothing. It reminded me that there was a world outside this house: a world of vastness and unimaginable beauty; a world that for now, remained out of my reach. That memory had repeatedly returned to me over the years. It’s as if the misery that surrounded that brief moment of freedom made it burn even brighter: a tiny light surrounded by darkness.”
- “You become increasingly comfortable with madness – and not just the madness of others, but your own. We’re all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.”
- “Once you name something, it stops you seeing the whole of it, or why it matters. You focus on the word, which is just the tiniest part, really, the tip of an iceberg.”
- “Sometimes it takes courage, you know, and a long time, to be honest.”
- “I believe the same is true for most people who go into mental health. We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged – we study psychology to heal ourselves. Whether we are prepared to admit this or not is another question.”
- “I suppose what scares me is giving in to the unknown.”
- “The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it. —ALICE MILLER
- “About fireworks?About love. About how we often mistake love for fireworks – for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm – and constant. I imagine you do give Kathy love – in the true sense of the word. Whether or not she is capable of giving it back to you is another question.”
- “Love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love.”
- “Trust, once lost, is hard to recover.”
- “At the time I didn’t understand. But that’s how therapy works. A patient delegates his unacceptable feelings to his therapist; and she holds everything he is afraid to feel, and feels it for him. Then, ever so slowly, she feeds his feelings back to him.”
- “Perhaps some of us are simply born evil, and despite our best efforts we remain that way.”
- “Somehow grasping at vanishing snowflakes is like grasping at happiness: an act of possession that instantly gives way to nothing.”
- “My old therapist used to say intimacy requires the repeated experience of being responded to—and that doesn’t happen overnight.”
- “need to open my eyes and look—and be aware of life as it is happening, and not simply how I want it to be.”
- Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways. Sigmund Freud
- “Sometimes it’s hard to grasp why it is that the answers to the present lie in the past. A simple analogy might be helpful: a leading psychiatrist in the field of sexual abuse once told me she had, in thirty years of extensive work with paedophiles, never met one who hadn’t himself been abused as a child. This doesn’t mean that all abused children go on to become abusers; but it is impossible for someone who was not abused to become an abuser. No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it: ‘A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.’ As babies, we are innocent sponges, blank slates – with only the most basic needs present: to eat, shit, love and be loved. But something goes wrong, depending on the circumstances into which we are born, and the house in which we grow up. A tormented, abused child can never take revenge in reality, as she is powerless and defenceless, but she can – and must – harbour vengeful fantasies in her imagination. Rage, like fear, is reactive in nature.”
- “I didn’t want to die. Not yet; not when I hadn’t lived.”
- “I was crying for all of us. There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other.”
- Though I am not naturally honest, I am sometimes so by chance
- “But that’s how therapy works. A patient delegates his unacceptable feelings to his therapist; and she holds everything he is afraid to feel, and she feels it for him. Then, ever so slowly, she feeds his feelings back to him.”
- “As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott put it, “There is no such thing as a baby.” The development of our personalities doesn’t take place in isolation, but in relationship with others—we are shaped and completed by unseen, unremembered forces; namely, our parents.”
- “Well, I’d rather be lonely than be with the wrong person.”
- “Despite my best homicidal fantasies, I wasn’t a murderer. I couldn’t kill him. I’d have to think of something cleverer than that.”
- “I was pursued by an infernal, relentless chorus of furies, all with his voice—shrieking that I was worthless, shameful, a failure.”
- “The development of our personalities doesn’t take place in isolation, but in relationship with others—we are shaped and completed by unseen, unremembered forces; namely, our parents. This is frightening, for obvious reasons. Who”
- “Once you name something, it stops you seeing the whole of it, or why it matters.”
- “Someone who has never learned to contain himself is plagued by anxious feelings for the rest of his life, feelings that Bion aptly titled nameless dread. Such a person endlessly seeks this unquenchable containment from external sources—he needs a drink or a joint to “take the edge off” this endless anxiety.”
- “For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about the homeless man. Apart from pity, there was another feeling, unnameable somehow—a kind of fear. I pictured him as a baby in his mother’s arms. Did she ever imagine her baby would end up crazy, dirty and stinking, huddled on the pavement, muttering obscenities?”
- “I’m forty two years old. And I became a psychotherapist because I was fucked-up. That’s the truth – though it’s not what I said during the interview when the question was put to me.”
- “The real motivation was purely selfish. I was on a quest to help myself. I believe the same is true for most people who go into mental health. We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged—we study psychology to heal ourselves.”
- “Who knows what indignities we suffered, what torments and abuses, in this land before memory? Our character was formed without our even knowing it. In my case, I grew up feeling edgy, afraid; anxious. This anxiety seemed to predate my existence and exist independently of me.”
- “My only hope of survival, I realised, was to retreat – physically as well as psychically.”
- “It’s hard to imagine two more different women than Kathy or Alicia. Kathy makes me think of light, warmth, colour and laughter. When I think of Alicia, I think only of depth, of darkness, of sadness. Of silence.”
- “When I first started therapy, I found it very hard to cry. I feared I’d be carried away by the flood, overwhelmed. Perhaps that’s what it feels like for you. That’s why it’s important to take your time to feel safe, and trust that you won’t be alone in this flood – that I’m treading water here with you.’ Silence. ‘I think of myself as a relational therapist,’ I said. ‘Do you know what that means?’ Silence. ‘It means I think Freud was wrong about a couple of things. I don’t believe a therapist can ever really be a blank slate, as he intended. We leak all kinds of information about ourselves unintentionally – by the colour of my socks, or how I sit or the way I talk – just by sitting here with you, I reveal a great deal about myself. Despite my best efforts at invisibility, I’m showing you who I am.’ Alicia looked up. She stared at me, her chin slightly tilted – was there a challenge in that look? At last I had her attention. I shifted in my seat. ‘The point is, what can we do about this? We can ignore it, and deny it, and pretend this therapy is all about you. Or we can acknowledge that this is a two-way street, and work with that. And then we can really start to get somewhere.’ I held up my hand. I nodded at my wedding ring. ‘This ring tells you something, doesn’t it?’ Alicia’s eyes ever-so-slowly moved in the direction of the ring. ‘It tells you I’m a married man. It tells you I have a wife.”
- “Snow is a very powerful imaginative symbol, don’t you think? Wipes everything clean.”
- “Our character was formed without our even knowing it. In my case, I grew up feeling edgy, afraid, anxious.”
- “I didn’t kill Gabriel. Gabriel killed me. All I did was pull the trigger.”
- “She used to say we are made up of different parts, some good, some bad, and that a healthy mind can tolerate this ambivalence and juggle both good and bad at the same time. Mental illness is precisely about a lack of this kind of integration—we end up losing contact with the unacceptable parts of ourselves.”
- “But that’s what Alicia did for you. Her silence was like a mirror—reflecting yourself back at you. And it was often an ugly sight.”
- “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways.”
- “when you’re naked and half-asleep under the covers—to whisper, “I’m sorry,” and mean it. All defenses and bullshit justifications are discarded, lying in a heap on the floor with our clothes.”
- “But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm – and constant.”
- “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. —SIGMUND FREUD, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis”
- “But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm—and constant.”
- “The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it.”
- “Her eyes opened. It was as if the light had been switched on inside them. They were the eyes of a child, wide and innocent, free of scorn or suspicion. Color seemed to come into her face. Suddenly she seemed wonderfully alive.”
- “I didn’t know it then, but it was too late – I had internalized him, buried him deep in my unconscious. No matter how far I ran, I carried him with me wherever I went. I was pursued by an infernal, relentless chorus of furies, all with his voice – shrieking that I was worthless, shameful, a failure.”
- “What she would do? She used to say we are made up of different parts, some good, some bad, and that a healthy mind can tolerate this ambivalence and juggle both good and bad at the same time. Mental illness is precisely about a lack of this kind of integration—we end up losing contact with the unacceptable parts of ourselves.”
- “Alicia’s body. But where Jean-Felix saw beauty, I saw only pain; I saw self-inflicted wounds, and scars of self-harm. ‘Did she ever talk to”
- “My father’s unpredictable and arbitrary rages made any situation, no matter how benign, into a potential minefield.”
- “Between the two of us, I had the most to lose, that was obvious. Kathy would survive – she was fond of saying she was tough as nails. She’d pick herself up, dust herself off and forget all about me. But I wouldn’t forget about her. How could I? Without Kathy I’d return to that empty, solitary existence I had endured before. I’d never met anyone like her again, never had that same connection or experience that depth of feelings for another human being. She was the love of my life – she was my life. And I wasn’t ready to give her up. Not yet. Even though she had betrayed me, I still loved her. Perhaps I was crazy after all…”
- “lacking in empathy and integrity and just plain kindness—all the qualities you brim with.”
- “at eighteen, I got the grades I needed to secure a place at university. I left that semi-detached prison in Surrey—and I thought I was free. I was wrong.”
- “But our ability to contain ourselves directly depends on our mother’s ability to contain us—if she had never experienced containment by her own mother, how could she teach us what she did not know? Someone who has never learned to contain himself is plagued by anxious feelings for the rest of his life, feelings that Bion aptly titled nameless dread. Such a person endlessly seeks this unquenchable containment from external sources—he needs a drink or a joint to “take the edge off” this endless anxiety. Hence my addiction to marijuana.”
- “Sometimes it’s hard to grasp why the answers to the present lie in the past.”
- “I was crying for all of us. There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other.”
- “No matter how far I ran, I carried him with me wherever I went. I was pursued by an infernal, relentless chorus of furies, all with his voice – shrieking that I was worthless, shameful, a failure.”