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I heard Lucy Daniels' “voice” when she spoke as the author at the Meet the Author session during an Academy meeting in Chapel Hill, NC. She had indeed found her own voice. I was impressed and fascinated by what she had to say as well as how she was able to convey her experiences. The book surpassed my expectations. Beautifully written, her characters, including her own, jump off the page and become larger than life to involve us in the heart wrenching story of her life. Suspense is never missing, and you need the tangible evidence of the book in your hand to know that all will be well. While the book portrays her successful struggle in overcoming severe chronic anorexia, depressions, and writer's block and thus is of special interest to psychologists and psychiatrists, it conveys human struggles beyond pathology, the conflicts between protective secrecy or non-being and the wish to emerge and become fully alive.
Born in Raleigh, NC into a well-to-do family of three generations in newspaper publishing, she depicts an intertwined slashing and binding atmosphere that reminds us of Tennessee Williams' powerful plays. She and her three sisters grew up in relative isolation, caught in their two parents' strong contradictory projections of themselves that defied any attempts to find an acceptable mode of existing. Like in a play setting, Daniels immediately depicts the physical setting of her story. She writes:
“Our house at 1540 Cornell Street had the appearance of a citadel. It combined the qualities of church and prison with exotic grandeur veiling alienation” (p. 5). The house reflected a mother who wanted to show she was better than other folks and prove her own worth by embellishing her prominent
Page 573and affluent husband. But “for Father, Mommy and her house were meant both to erase past failures and to provide impregnable protection against future losses. The problem was that this protection also made their marriage an exquisite prison in which Mommy's straining to be i