Cry room

• Both novels feature protagonists who lose parents and partners, and both explore their themes via writer-narrators who are producing fictions.
• In the story, Susie is employed by a crying room where people go to express their emotions.
• She thought of the clink, clink, clink of sharp metal implements chipping away patiently at cold, dark, stone.
• They reminded Susie of miners in a cave, with a small circle of light above them to illuminate their features.
• She thought of the clink, clink, clink of sharp metal implements chipping away patiently at cold, dark, stone.
• The tree, growing against the odds in a hot climate, amid the bones of a long-dead calf, symbolises hope.

Distruped expectations

• Briohny Doyle’s Why We Are Here, which might be labelled as autofiction, also disrupts expectations.
• She lives in a condemned apartment, with trappings of faded grandeur, making Silver City almost affordable.
• When Franz is expelled by the closing of the borders, BB remains alone with her dog Baby and spectral visitations from “Him”.
• BB imagines these pronouncements are philosophical observations by Simone Weil, whose book Gravity and Grace she reads as a “vision of surrender”.
• Although she finds a language to engage with troubled dogs like the Doberman, she’s distrusted by local trainers who see her as competition.

Elegy

• Maybe it’s elegy.
• Maybe it’s elegy.
• They decide that elegy is having a moment, but that it’s also “problematic, Judeo-Christian, colonial, or at the very least nostalgic”.
• But in elegy, the way a person dies is not the point.
• With the climate catastrophe looming in the background, Doyle and Shirm are renovating the elegy for the current moment.