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You walk inside yourself, and the tenuous, meandering reflection that guides you
…
is a secret stream, not of water but of pulse-beats: calls and answers and calls a thread of clarities among the tall grasses and the beasts of the mind that crouch in the darkness.
The Mermaid Chair, a delightful magical-realism tale by the author of the best-selling novel The Secret Life of Bees, is a meditation on the power of unconscious secrets, the impossibility of escaping them, and the psychic confinement they create when they can neither be remembered nor forgotten. In this poignantly symmetrical novel of abandoned and imperfect mourning, several of the characters have a secret, an area of the past they want to forget, but cannot forget; they are thus stuck in a sort of memory-limbo. Their lives are crippled by the unconscious conflicts they retain about a traumatic event in their past, which they all try unsuccessfully to escape. As psychoanalysis teaches and this novel illustrates, their healing does not (and cannot) lie in escape but in the relationships they have with one another. It is only in the context of these relationships that they are able to begin to listen to the unconscious reverberations of their past, and collectively to (re-)construct their history in a way that allows them to confront it.
Jessie, the protagonist of The Mermaid Chair, is a former artist who had been happily married for 20 years to Hugh, a psychiatrist. They have a daughter who has just left for college. Over time, Jessie comes to the painful recognition that, since her father's “suspicious” death when she was a little girl, she had lived the past 30 years of her life “molded to the smallest space possible … I'd never done anything that took my own breath away and I