Marilyn Malinao
The title character is Marilyn Malinao. As the narrator writes fairly early in the text, “My foster mother called me Marilyn Malinao. I said I am Amanda Reavey now.” The author is therefore the narrator who is therefore the title character who calls herself Amanda Reavey and then later Ngoho because it is a verb. This is a complex and complicated book, structurally speaking at least, with the nation of self-identity as its thematic core. The confusion and ambiguity over something as seemingly simple as a person’s name is right in keeping with that complexity.
The Mother
The word mother appears more than 250 times in the book, often without any surrounding context, sometimes as nothing but a word typed over and over again ala Jack Torrance and very often—notably so—as the only descriptive term for the narrator’s biological mother. It is not that the author does not know the name of the woman who gave birth to her, but the insistence to maintain psychological distance is palpable as a result of the decision to refer to her almost universally as “my mother.”
Hélène Cixous
Groundbreaking and revolutionary French philosopher Hélène Cixous becomes an important character in the book simply as a result of being referenced for her observation that “text is a labyrinth.” The structural foundation of the text is as significant as the content: an entire section is printed vertically, forcing the reader to turn the pages sideways or like reorient it on a screen display. This brings the reader into the physical processes of reading in a way that is not usual and becomes a commentary upon the theoretical foundations of the book paying allegiance to the work of Cixous.
