(This may be apocryphal.) That is because he believed there are no final answers or explanations the therapy, and whatever understanding it involves, is all in the talking. It reminded me of one of Jacques Lacan’s techniques during phone sessions: just as it sounded as though his patient was getting to some sort of epiphany, he would hang up. The long trails of thought sometimes break off this way, on a dash and a line break Greengrass employs the same device to register dialogue, as if speaking were just an interruption in the flow of our internal monologue (which, perhaps, it is after all). She would page through medical textbooks, looking at images of “bodies dissected or described”, reading case files and contemplating “all the many ways there are to see inside ourselves and still I feel that, correctly understood, they might constitute a key – ”. One section details the period after her mother’s death when she would spend days and days reading aimlessly about science and history, seeking “a way to understand myself by analogy, a pattern recognised in other lives which might be drawn across my own to give it shape and, given shape, to give it impetus, direction”. The narrative brushes back and forth in time, bringing unexpected connections to the surface. Sight is narrated by a nameless young woman who, pregnant with her second child, meditates on her mother’s death and its aftermath, her relationship with her psychoanalyst grandmother, and how difficult it was to decide to have her first baby. Or rather, she adapts it to her own specific literary sensibilities: ruminative, taking a judicious distance from things, just far enough to see the links between them, but not so far she misses their textures. The author of an award-winning short story collection, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, Greengrass adapts to the novel format with enviable flexibility. What we can know of our bodies, ourselves, or each other is the subject of Jessie Greengrass’s debut novel.
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