Love Me Tender

 Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage. 

I’m breaking the fourth wall again for these last two blog posts—this one on Love Me Tender and the upcoming Conclusions post. I think it lets me say a little more than when I’m playing at the woodland witch. 

So, getting to this final novel (wow)—I was really taken off guard by how quickly this book took off. It hit the ground running and stayed running, with all the commas making each sentence feel almost disconnected. I had to pay close attention to the capital letters and the punctuation to make sure I was following the sentence structure properly, and knowing who was saying what. 

It kind of felt like I was being slapped in the face with every new statement that Debre dropped, and it was really conflicting for me because I kept getting checked like, ‘I really need to wait until I’ve finished reading this sentence and the next three sentences before I come to a conclusion’. It felt like I was constantly trying to jump the gun, my mind was reading so quickly because the sentences were short, the chapters were short, and even within the sentences it felt as if the words were snowballing as fast as an avalanche, picking up speed with every passing moment. 

I struggled to sympathize with the narrator for most of the book, especially in the beginning. I think that if I’d taken a step back to look at the picture Debre was painting, I would’ve considered the narrator’s situation worth my sympathy, since it really is just a miserable spot to be stuck in—to be frustrated by false accusations that hold power just because they come from someone that your society considers ‘superior’. The narrator seemed trapped by the limitations of womanhood, and it was as if she was aware of this sometimes, but would forget other times. She acknowledges the ‘absurdity that comes with being a woman, the obscenity that comes with being a mother’ (Debre, 46) but also finds a way to untether (and almost forget?) herself from such an identity through her (surprisingly graphic (in terms of description, relative to the books we’ve read throughout the term)) sexual encounters. 

My first impression of her sort of veered towards ‘typical insensitive male on the internet in a woman’s body’ before turning to ‘hey, she’s a mother who is put in a frustrating position by this weird guy who is unfortunately her husband’. I really think that zooming out and looking at the positions of the narrator and her family helped me gain perspective and realize that she isn't what my first impression of her was, but that she's just another person who's experiencing a sort of grief in her own way. She's cynical. She repeats that she's tired and exhausted and her life is repetitive and two years might as well be a thousand for her. After telling myself that, I sort of reset my impressions and wild conclusions and settled in, and from there on out I was on her side.

Final discussion prompt of the term: what was your initial impression of the narrator? Did you think that Laurent's accusations were baseless from the get-go, or did you have some suspicions?

Your Other local woodland witch,

June