Mad Iguana

Oh my lord @raine this is magnificent. Heartfelt and raw but with real beauty too (I don’t think you can help your writing being beautiful, frankly). That images of the monsters under the sea and the line about undoing her smile as if it had never been, the line about her joys being taken away – joy in his kindness, moments of softness. So vivid,…[Read more]

ooh, very interesting angle @sandradavies.I like using a secondary character to shed light on the story and this is a very vivid reveal – of both the son and father. The impression I got of the father was a sadistic bully who asserts power and enjoys it. The lines about the Duncans implies a family of note of some kind – or maybe notoriety? these…[Read more]

So very interesting @bellam, especially as your explanations show just how much you have buried below the surface of the letters. Very well done, both of them.

I too got a sense of a unreliable narrator in the first letter – do we believe her? I doubted her – and in the second one you have nailed the young, inexperienced voice and that line…[Read more]

thank you all! It was a surprise for me how it took off.

Thanks @sandradavies and @bellam both. It’s interesting – as I was writing this, I was thinking that it didn’t really tell me anything about the ‘inner lives’ of either Abigail or John. But in hindsight, perhaps it does. More about John though than Abigail, I think?

And yes, I think she needed to get out fast, and I think she did. She felt quite…[Read more]

This does give me a good sense of the father though, I think. A shouty, philandering, ‘man’s man’. Working class. I get the impression he’s one of those people who puts others down a lot but always in the form of jokes so any hurt feelings can be laughed of with a ‘can’t you take a joke?’. Does that come close?

Aaaah, that makes so much sense now – re the lie! Very clever!

@janeshuff – yes, Waltraut was trying to escape him. He wasn’t pulling the strings, she had simply tired of him.

@raine – glad you picked up on the unreliability. Waltraut ultimately got him out of her life by framing him for cheating in his exams, resulting in him getting thrown out of school and all manner of other ills. As for the second…[Read more]

What a fantastic voice!
“…who can take my own smiles and undo them, undo them until I forget how they were ever made” – wow. Just wow.

I’m very sorry that Abigail had the misfortune of loving someone like John, who, I suspect, may not even be capable of love.

Ooh, how interesting. And I like the idea of doing the exercise around a minor character to see what it may reveal about a major one. Even if it does result in the minor pushing in.