The Past
“She’d picked up this book about a doll’s house from the shelf in her room quite casually and fondly, remembering how she had liked it in her childhood, not at all expecting to be ambushed with overwhelming emotion. Every so often she looked up from the page and stared around her as if she hardly knew where she was — but she was at Kington, which was the beloved scene of her past anyway. So her glance through the panes of the old glass in the arched window, to the yellowing rough grass in the garden and the alders which grew along the stream, didn’t restore any equilibrium. It wasn’t only the recollection attached to the words she was reading — a memory of other readings — which moved her. The story itself, in its own words, tapped into deep reservoirs of feeling. The writer’s touch was very sure and true, unsentimental — one of the doll’s-house dolls died, burned up in a fire. The book seemed to open up for Alice a wholesome and simplifying way of seeing things which she had long ago lost or forgotten, and hadn’t hoped to find again.”
Writing about memory/nostalgia/the past/however you want to phrase it is like capturing water through a sieve — elusive, ungraspable, abstract — yet I loved the way Tessa Hadley used, in the scene above, a book as the concrete tool that zaps a character back decades. This was but one very minor scene in her novel (appropriately called) The Past, but I loved it for its precision.
{PS: The Past is like a British sidekick to Wish You Were Here by Stewart O’Nan. Make a multi-generation family vacation home a “character” in your novel, and you will likely lure me in start-to-finish with very few breaks…almost as if I were on holiday myself. 🏡🏞️ Also, I don’t think this is the book she’s referring to, but who else loved The Dollhouse Murders by Betty Ren Wright as a kid?! Gotta get my hands on a copy STAT.}
originally published on instagram