Recommended Reading: The Words To Say It

The Words To Say It is the autobiographical account of Marie Cardinal, a French woman who was born in 1928 in Algiers, the capital of Algeria, which was under French rule at the time. Her journey, although in a different time and place than many of us today, parallels are own.

When we met Marie, she is a 27 year old mother of three suffering from an illness, constant menstrual bleeding, that no physician has been able to treat. She feels herself going mad, in a constant battle with the "Thing". So unable to function, she is taken to her maternal uncle's sanatorium. The drugs make her sleep, but cannot relieve her from her suffering, they cannot stop the "Thing" from consuming her. As a desperate, last resort, she pulls herself together enough to be allowed to walk the grounds and promptly escapes with the help of a friend. Desperate not be locked away again, she takes up the recommendation to see a  psychoanalyst as a last resort, as they are known for being highly against institutionalizing their patients.

But we do not spend countless pages reading her interactions with the doctor. No, this is not a book about psychoanalysis, but what Marie learns about herself and her family, through her memories and actions over the seven years she is in analysis. It is beautifully written (and translated). One of the most important things she comes to understand is the influence of her mother, both unconscious and conscious. Her mother, who never wanted her. Her mother, who tried to abort her and told her as much, her mother, whose love belonged to a dead daughter, her mother, for whom she was never good enough. This is a story we all know very well, and it is Marie's story of coming to terms with and moving beyond it.

And that is why I recommend it. Marie's journey is fascinating and insightful, you won't be disappointed. But do yourself a favor and buy it used, because it's published as material for psychology students and thus as a textbook it costs a small fortune.

Here is an excerpt, Marie's memories of being pregnant with her first child and recalling with disgust all the things her very devout Catholic mother had tried to do to induce a miscarriage:

But to my mother, these signs of life meant only that she had not yet been able to kill me. Ah! What a nuisance! And it goes on for so long: minutes, hours, days, weeks, months. There is so much time to get to know the little one who lives inside you. Is there any greater intimacy or promiscuity? Did each of my movements inside the womb remind her of the odious coupling of which I was the issue?

So she swing onto her rusty bike and rode off into the wasteland of refuse. I hope you're having a ball in there, my girl, my little fish, you'll see how I am going to snap your spine! Get out. Take a look. See if I'm up to it!

She mounted her old nag, and giddap! Do you feel the battering ram against your hideous body? Darling! This'll work up a fine storm to shatter a little submarine! No? This'll make some some fine waves to drown the little diver! Well? Go away, you little shit, get the hell out of here!

Still moving? Here's something to calm you down. Quinine, aspirin! Sleep, little darling, sleep, little baby, let me rock you; drink, my beauty, drink the lovely poisoned brew. You'll see what fun you're going to have in the toboggan of my ass when you're well and truly rotted by drugs, drowned like a sewer rat. Death to you! Death to you!

At last, powerless, resigned, defeated, disappointed, she let me slip out alive into life, the way you let slip a turd. And what about the little girl/turd coming slow, face forward, towards the light she saw down there at the end of the narrow, moist passage, at the end of the tunnel? What was going to happen to her on the outside where already she had been so mistreated? Tell me, Mother, did you know that you were pushing her into madness? Did you question it?

What I have referred to as the beastliness in my mother is not because she wanted an abortion (there are times when a woman is not capable of having children, not capable of loving enough); on the contrary, her beastliness consisted in not having followed through on her desire to have an abortion. Then, in having continued to project her hatred onto me when I was inside her, and, finally, in having chosen to speak of her wretched crime, her weak attempts to murder me. It was as if, having bungled it, she were starting up again, fourteen years later, without risking her own skin, in comparative safety.