Friday, July 11, 2008

feminine and lovely and floral

Dahlia: Discuss.


What were your first impressions of Dahlia?
Did they change through the book?
What was engaging about her?
What was repulsive about her?
Did she indeed "need help?"
Posted by at

10 comments:

kc said...

This book deeply affected me. I started off just really enjoying it — the sassy, tell-it-like-it-is tone, the conversational narrative. It began darkly and just kept getting darker and darker, like black-hole, suck-you-into-the-abyss dark. It depressed/impressed (dimpressed?) me like only two other books ever have: “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath and a book of Diane Arbus’ photographs. I think what they all have in common is a portrait of singular loneliness and unflinching, unsentimental honesty. This is what my experience was. No sugarcoating. Dahlia looks at the people and circumstances in her life with the frank focus of Diane Arbus’ camera, and it simultaneously draws you in and makes you want to flee.

10:09 AM, July 12, 2008
Erin said...

I think Dahlia did "need help," but I certainly don't think she was mentally ill. The tragedy of Dahlia to me was how completely her family failed her. If she'd had someone who unfailingly loved, supported and guided her, her life could've been much different.

10:13 AM, July 14, 2008
rev amy said...

The story was compellingly dark but because it was honestly real, like you say, kc.

In the first three or four chapters Dahlia made me laugh out loud (a very rare occurance for me when reading/watching tv/movies whatever). She was so unexpectedly, cynically, funny.

As the book progressed my sense of her entrapment grew and grew. Not by cancer so much but, as you say erin, by the total lack of supportive and loving relationships. Though she might take issue with my last statement re: her dad.

She was someone I deeply wanted to help yet doubted that she would be interested in any assistance from me. She was so wraped in a defiant, wounded, independence/isolation.

What a character.

11:54 AM, July 14, 2008
rev amy said...

I was really torn about whether or not she was "mentally ill." She certainly had no self-awareness of it for most of the book and gave off no clues. But then I began to wonder if it might be better to believe other characters in the book rather than her. Not Rabbi-Dan of course, but when other people began to suggest her need for help, I thought it might be true.

Anti-depressants, counseling (as in a totally supportive, confidental, all-for-Dahlia's benefit relationship) would have benefited her.

11:58 AM, July 14, 2008
Erin said...

Counseling would've been great for her, I think. She definitely needed someone willing to listen, someone who didn't immediately want to write her off with "you need help."

8:21 PM, July 14, 2008
kc said...

It never crossed my mind that she was mentally ill. I just thought of her as someone who refused to wear any kind of blinders anymore — who looked at the world and the people in her life, including herself, and saw them for what they were.

It's like in "I Capture the Castle" when Cassandra says Then I began to think: "Who am I? Who am I?" Whenever I do that, I feel one good push would shove me over the edge of lunacy. My sense was that Dahlia was asking the question and wasn't shrinking from the answer.

I suppose we all could benefit from counseling, Dahlia no more so than anyone else. I think what she needed, as Erin so aptly said, was an experience of deep love. I thought one of the most poignant moments in the whole book was when she was talking about the boy who loved her in college, who was completely devoted to her, and she treated him like garbage. And she realizes years later that she treated him like garbage. And she's deeply sorry about it. I thought the point of that was not just that she finally understood a youthful incident of selfishly mistreating another person (we all have those sad realizations, don't we?) but that everything in her life up to that point had so poorly prepared her to recognize and accept genuine love. She had no experience of love that enabled her to put a proper value on what he was offering her. She didn't have to work for his esteem. It was just there, and it was ridiculous to her because it didn't cost her anything. If she had had the experience of feeling valued and loved by her family, she could have gone into that experience feeling like he loves and values me because I'm lovable and valuable instead of there must be something wrong with him for loving me.

10:09 PM, July 14, 2008
rev amy said...

kc, I think reading about that boy in college was when I began to think that maybe Dahlia indeed "needed help." Without it she seemed doomed to play out her anger at her brother and parents in all her other relationships.

Well, actually, I think we all do that. We use our family system as a model for other intimate relationships. Some of us just have better starting ground than others.

What about Mara? Do you two think that she loved Dahlia and could have been the deep connection Dahlia needed if Dahlia had kept up her end of the relationship? Mara's only betrayal seemed to be that she had too domesticated a life for Dahlia.

I was mad at Albert that she never revealed what happened to Mara's father.

8:46 AM, July 15, 2008
kc said...

Yeah, I think there was potential with Mara. I had the sense that she was there for Dahlia but that Dahlia kind of scared her off. It seemed like Dahlia expected an intensity from people that they weren't necessarily capable of providing.

7:14 AM, July 17, 2008
Erin said...

And Mara's friendship, while valuable, couldn't have made up for the failures of Dahlia's family.

I liked the scene when Dahlia went to visit Mara and her fiance and wound up getting dead drunk and having to be carried out of the bar. And Mara said, "This isn't cute anymore, Dahlia." And that made me stop for a minute because I thought, yeah, that's how I would feel, too, if my high school friend came to visit and acted like a drunken bum. I would be annoyed and exasperated. I wouldn't feel like loving and supporting her. I was really on Dahlia's side by this point in the book, but that line made me think again that Dahlia was probably a real pain in the ass to be around, even if she had good reason.

10:12 AM, July 17, 2008
kc said...

Yes, that was a telling scene! There were other scenes, too, where I thought she might be kind of annoying to hang out with, and, generally, it would be annoying to hear complaining from someone who didn't have to work for a living. Her charms, though, and insightfulness redeemed a lot for me.

3:30 PM, July 17, 2008

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)