The Weight
The first-person narrator briefly comments on the moment she got the phone call informing her that her mother’s gravestone was finally ready. She recalls standing with “the phone in my hand, my outsides unaltered but everything within me plummeting. Like a sandbank collapsing inside me.” This scene occurs very early in the book, so early that not much is really yet known about the narrator. The weight this metaphorical imagery conveys gives insight into her emotional state related to her mother’s death in a more powerful way than a literal description might.
The Cost of Silence
The instigating action of the narrative is the unnamed narrator suddenly deciding to just up and head off to spend time in convent. The sheer physical presence of the abbey is overwhelming. “The silence is so thick it makes me feel wealthy.” This is certainly not the kind of metaphor one comes across every day. The suggestion seems to be a reference to the wasteful opulence wealthy people are gullible enough to buy at an inflated price. Only in a rich person’s mansion is there really the same sense of silence.
Grief and Shame
The presence of grief is as overwhelming as the silence in the abbey. The narrator guiltily admits to feeling a sense of shame at the death of her parents. This shameful feeling “recedes sometimes but then it returns and I’m eternally stuck; a lumbering, crying, self-pitying child. The fact of grief quietly making itself known, again and again.” In this passage the narrator is combining grief and shame into an inextricably intertwined singular sensation. The metaphorical imagery of shame being like a tide that always returns actually transforms grief into a recursive fact of life impossible to reject or escape.
Moving On
The presence of grief related to the deaths of the narrator’s parents is a constantly recurring motif. She explains how in the wake of those deaths which occurred not very far apart that “for many years I felt as though I were breathing and moving through some kind of glue.” This is a very effective use of simile to describe the slow-motion process of being able to move on from the despondency that is a natural part of the process of mourning. The image of trying to move at a normal pace while moving through a viscous hold on you from the past obstructing your pathway to the future is simply stated and easily understood.
Comic Irony
The narrator introduces a cute bit of comic irony into the metaphorical language used to describe the interior decorating inside the nunnery. “Like the house of an elderly aunt, but with crucifixes instead of ‘Bless this house’ plaques.” The comparison is clear enough while still leaving room for a lightly ironic joke. While the presence of crucifixes might or might not be appropriate inside an elderly aunt’s house, it certainly seems far from inappropriate to find a “bless this house” plaque inside the abbey of a convent. In fact, the irony of the simile even hints that it is questionable why such plaque wouldn’t be hung on the walls along with the crucifixes.
