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The author repeats that feat – in fact, with even greater skill – in The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually. The book depicts the relationship between Maeve and Murtagh and, in particular, Maeve’s struggles with being the sort of mother to her four children she would like to be. In fact, to be the sort of person she would like to be. Cullen's quietly devastating second novel is both a family saga and a careful exploration of the reality of living with mental health issues i paper Rather than tell the truth in all its details, the speaker asks the reader to tell it in “Circuit.” One should jump around the truth, sharing bits and pieces of it without ever revealing the whole thing. She explains why this is the case in the next two lines.
Novels that explore the challenges faced by victims of mental health problems can make for difficult reads although, at their best, they help to illuminate the hardships faced by the sufferers and their loved ones. From Mrs Dalloway to Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s recent Starling Days, writers have frequently imagined characters laid low by inexplicable anxieties and depression, sometimes succumbing to their illness, sometimes surviving it. Metaphors – First are the comparisons of truth with light. Just like light removes darkness and allows people to see, truth removes falsehood and lets people see from their inner eye, i.e., think.There is one particularly hilarious moment involving the oldest child, Nollaig, and more of this anarchic humour would have been welcome throughout While I appreciate books shining a light on mental illness, and the terrible things it can do to a family, there was something about this story that made me feel uncomfortable. It may be because it seemed that Maeve (despite being treated as a teenager in the US) never seemed to seek help or her family never encouraged her to see someone and receive therapy or medication for her dark down days. And when you get Maeve's POV, her thoughts are very painful to read ("It's better to love a dead mother than a mad one" - no, on so many levels).
Elizabeth’s reading (#31, 32) is right on, except line 3, where she writes “inform” instead of “infirm”. Expectation and reward. Expectation and reward. Expectation, expectation. Are you listening? You are listening? Really? Well then, here’s what you’ve expected: your reward. That’s a forced attenuation strategy that doesn’t even call significantly on the content of the words. Even if you weren’t listening to the words, you could hear the music of them—like the songs we sing our children, the lyrics of which are often quite dark and distressing, though the melodies sound nice. This is a way to raise the threat of danger in the midst of calm. It is also a way to create calm in the midst of danger. Create a pattern, reward that pattern, and disrupt that pattern—but rather than leaving the poem in that state of disruption, return to the pattern. This terrific book by Irish author Helen Cullen felt like a very appropriate book for the day that’s in it (Nollaig na mBan) and for the time of year (Christmas and post-Christmas) - an emotional, gut punch of a read, a compassionate insight into mental illness, a brilliant story, it brought me to tears several times and I found it very hard to put it down. I loved it. Lies is an interesting word to use when discussing truth. Does it mean success is to be found in circuit or that that success is lying?We start at the beginning of their love, and the many trials in between. The family crashes into a wall of grief, but Murtagh’s journey must continue on and his heart alters them all in unpredictable ways. Shaking the foundations of the island and his grown children’s world, his affections give rise to many torments. Maeve may well have had many periods when ‘the crow came to sit on her shoulder’ (I can’t think of a more fitting symbolism for depression) times that stole her focus away from everything in her life, but she knew her family better than they knew themselves, her beloved Murtagh in particular. The children suffer, through no fault of Maeve nor Murtagh’s, how can you lay blame on a disease that most of us don’t understand. It’s the illness, there are times it overtakes despite her best efforts to remain on an even keel. There are good times, there are bad times. ‘These thoughts run relay races in my mind’, and Maeve can’t always master them. Pills aren’t always the answer, so she attempts to expunge these thoughts through her own methods. Sadly, some ‘spells’ last longer than others, and it’s exhausting for her. It’s so exhausting pretending she is fine, hurting those she loves. It’s nothing new, it’s always been a part of her life, the very darkness that worried her parents when she first traveled to Dublin as a young woman. The poem begins with a simple call to action, namely, to tell the truth but to tell it slant. An interesting word there, slant, but still pretty easy to understand. Instead of telling the truth in a direct, blunt fashion, we should tell it at an angle. Pretty straightforward, right? Really, there’s nothing exciting here. Some simple truisms that we can all nod our heads at and say, “Yep, sounds right,” then head to work without thinking about it again. But like many of the rhymes in much of Emily’s other work, something is off. It starts with the second word. Does all mean to tell the whole truth or tell everyone the truth? As you continue to look, more words and phrases remain strangely ambiguous or completely undefined. We’re left with questions instead of answers — an odd thing for a poem about telling the truth. It tells the story of Murtagh and Maeve, a young couple from two different worlds who meet in Dublin in the 70’s and forge their lives together. So wonderful on the Irish family and the utter complexity of motherhood, family entanglement and love Elaine Feeney, poet and author of As You Were
The move to Inis Óg allows Cullen to fully stretch her descriptive wings, painting achingly beautiful word-portraits of the island and the house that Murtagh and Maeve move into, so that Murtagh can take up his apprenticeship under the island’s resident potter. Cullen’s prose sings, and both the island’s rugged beauty and the cottage’s transformation under the Moones’ stewardship give ample opportunity to display the very best of her poetic sentences.I also found the writer’s treatment of suicide irresponsible, depicting it as an act of love, and attributing no regret to the character in her final moments. Most people who try to kill themselves and survive almost instantly regret it. Maybe this character was one of the exceptions, but the book almost romanaticised the act. Another metaphor used is in the last line, Or every man be blind –Here blindness does not mean actual blindness. Blindness means the inability to see or understand the truth. It is the refusal to believe the truth. Just like light helps people to see, too much light is also blinding. The next two lines explain why an indirectly told truth is more readily accepted. Rewritten from the inverted sentence structure, we have, “The Truth’s superb surprise is too bright for our infirm delight.” An indirect method of telling the truth will be more successful because it softens the blow of truths that can be too intense ( too bright). Think of the phrase “hard truths”. But why didn’t we? The kind of hook and eye she comes to by the end of the short poem is an equally logical image. And, thus, we have been rewarded. It’s a thumb on the nose to the reader who thinks he knows what he wants. It’s a way to force us to pay more careful attention to the world we think we already know. Perhaps the worst affected is their daughter Nollaig who drops out of college to look after her father and ends up in a sort of stasis, unsure of how to move forward or what to do with her life. ‘In the darkest part of her heart, in a secret spot of truth lived a fear that her life in the island has simply saved her from a similar fate elsewhere, one without the excuse of self-appointed responsibilities to explain her loneliness. At least on the island she could call it sacrifice. What would it be called out there?'
In conclusion, Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant is a poem from which we can take practical advice. Written centuries ago, it always will stay true and helpful. It is not that “we can’t handle the truth”, it is more “we can’t handle the truth at once”. But the truth is inevitable. It is better to take it slowly than all at once. There were certainly elements of this book I liked but there were too many bits that made me feel weird and sad that I don't think I can articulate properly so it can't be higher than a 3-star for me. She only focuses on how this truth must be revealed. She does not care what kind of light it is, she cares about how bright the light is. Blinding people means that if the truth is too hard to swallow or too controversial that it shakes the very foundation of people’s beliefs, it will make people ignore it. People will choose not to believe it since it is too much to take and this will make them never accept it. Hence, to avoid this, it must be revealed gradually. The Deeper Meaning of Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant Murtaugh and Maeve meet as students in Dublin, where he is studying ceramics and she has come from the US to do a course in drama. So begins an epic love story with a dark undercurrent, for Maeve suffers from debilitating periods of deep depression when she completely shuts down. They take a risk and marry, she giving up her potential career as an actress to move with him to a wild island off the coast of Galway, where he can pursue his dream of becoming a successful potter. Here they raise four children, and Maeve struggles to keep a hold on everyday life, but tragedy awaits and the family must find a way to move forward.
When Murtagh is given the opportunity to pursue his career as a potter on Inis Óg, a small island off the coast of Galway in Ireland, it means Maeve giving up her own aspirations. It’s just one of the things that creates the first small fissures in Maeve’s mental state. Those fissures will gradually expand until the whole edifice comes crashing down. As the book progresses, we witness heartbreaking moments such as Maeve recording in her journal her ‘good’ days and ‘bad’ days and finding the second have become more numerous than the first. She worries about the impact the days when despair overwhelms her is having on her children, and on Murtagh in particular. ‘Murtagh is so loyal, he would never leave me. He would endure the challenge of living with me and my moods and my difficulties until the end of time if I let him.’ Stylistic features include idiosyncratic use of punctuation — that is, apart from two dashes, there is none. So nothing impedes the power of the poem. Capitalised words like Children and Truth emphasise their importance.
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