All the Lonely People
You can replace the Eleanor Rigby with the Eleanor who narrates this novel. When the Beatles asked where all those lonely people come from back in the 1960’s, they were talking about the distant past. Rigby and Father McKenzie both come across as older and likely seniors. Their loneliness, it appeared, was brought on by the effects of time as much as anything. The imagery below written by the thirty-year-old Eleanor speaks to a new generation of all the younger lonely people:
“These days, loneliness is the new cancer—a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.”
Mummy’s Cruelty
The relationship between Eleanor and her mother is quite evidently complicated. However, it is difficult to fully explain just how complicated the relationship is without introducing spoilers unnecessarily which give away very significant information. The imagery below offers a definitive example of just how significantly more complex this mother/daughter relationship actually is than it already appears. This is the kind of story that makes reading a book a second time something close an entirely new experience. The cruelty expressed Mummy toward her daughter is almost unbearable, but once all the mystery is yanked and truths become revealed, these conversations are worth reading again from the new perspective one will have gained;
“Oh dear,” she said. “Dancing’s for the beautiful people, Eleanor. The thought of you, lumbering about like a walrus…” She laughed long and hard. “Oh, thank you, thanks very, darling. That’s made my night, it really has.” She laughed again. “Eleanor, dancing!”
The Worst Concert in the World
Eleanor has had a bad night, which is an understatement. It is not just any night, but the night. The big night. The night she is going to finally meet the man who is going to change her life: Johnnie Lomond. Only it doesn’t go well. And then goes bad. And then things get worse. And, finally, the past and the present mingle into a blur that sends the night straight into the dark past that reopens the void of the trauma that has brought to this moment:
“Fire. I heard screams, and could not tell if they were mine. The bass drum beat fast with my heart, the snare drum skittered like my pulse. The room was full of smoke, and I couldn’t see. Screams, my own and hers. The bass drum, the snare. The spurt of adrenaline, speeding the tempo, nauseatingly strong, too strong for my small body, for any small body. The screaming. I pushed out, out, pushed past every obstacle, stumbling, panting, until I was outside, out in the dark black night.”
Borderline Personality Disorder
Eleanor mentions several times she’s been diagnosed with clinical depression. Some of the imagery of her narration, snatches of conversation, and behavior, however, strongly indicate symptoms that she actually suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder. For instance, observe how the imagery below could be interpreted as a manifestation of this particular diagnostic criterion of the BPD: “disconnecting from your thoughts or sense of identity or “out of body” type of feelings.”
“It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock.”
