Friend of My Youth

“She often spoke of the Ottawa Valley, which was her home […] in a dogmatic, mystified way, emphasizing things about it that distinguished it from any other place on earth.”

The narrator is often bemused by what she sees as her mother’s deliberate sentimentality, whether she is describing Flora or the landscape of her childhood. The narrator is determined not to succumb to this sentimentality herself, and to see things as they really are. At the same time she has a respectful tender feeling for her mother’s sense of the Ottawa Valley, which is an almost religious one.

“The house was divided in an unexpected way.”

This is a literal description of the Grieves family farmhouse, but it also works as a metaphor. The Grieves family is divided, while trying to present a united front. Moreover, the real divisions are unexpected. Flora remains Ellie’s loyal caretaker, even though Ellie has married Flora’s former fiancé. It is Robert Deal—the former fiancé—who seems shut out from the intimate life of the house.

“He must have been there, he must have been sitting there in the room.”

The narrator is evoking Robert Deal, whom the narrator’s mother barely mentions, in telling the story of the Grieves sisters. The mother’s silence around this character is a prim and embarrassed one, having to do with Robert Deal’s disruptive sexuality. Yet the narrator intuits Robert Deal’s own silence and passivity as his masculine detachment from the proceedings around him.