Mary

Content Warning: This section discusses sexual assault, child abuse, violence, and murder. Stigmatizing language about mental health is reproduced in quotations only.

“So why did he fire you? they ask.

‘Get this. “It’s just, the owners think we need staff that’s a little more Zendaya and a little less Jane Eyre.” Can you fucking believe that?!’”

In one of her first conversations with her Loved Ones, Mary highlights the Horror and Invisibility of Middle-Aged Womanhood. She loses her job at the bookstore, not because she has an odd personality but because she is middle-aged. Ironically, her boss put off firing her because he kept forgetting that she even exists, highlighting how her age makes others ignore her.

“‘Well, you would know better than me.’ Burton scribbles on the pad. Rip. He hands me the slip of paper. ‘Look, I don’t envy the experience,’ he says, and now he’s talking to both women in the room. ‘But try to think of it as a second puberty. No fun. But natural. Glad you’ve come to spend some time with us in Arroyo.’”

After Mary passes out in the shower, she has to go to the hospital at the Cross House to get treatment. Like her New York doctor, Dr. Burton ignores the severity of her symptoms because he assumes that they are related to menopause. Instead, he describes what Mary is going through as “natural” and “a second puberty”—demeaning language that infantilizes her while brushing aside her very real concerns.

“‘Hey.’ Eleanor says to my back as I fit the books into my purse. ‘I’ve got a crazy idea.’

‘No!’ I quickly look back at her. ‘Not crazy.’

‘Um…what?’

‘Don’t call yourself crazy. That’s a word people use to make you small. Don’t do it for them.’”

Throughout the novel, Mary bristles and reacts strongly anytime someone says the word “crazy.” Her childhood and the abuse she suffered at Clearview, a psychiatric institution, have made her deeply aware of the Stigma of Mental Illness and Medical Trauma. At the same time, Mary’s anger at the word “crazy” reflects centuries of gendered assumptions about women being more irrational and mentally unstable than men.