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A review by birdwithabrain
Lucia by Alex Pheby
5.0
Alex Pheby's writing is fantastic. The imagery this book evokes is vivid and moving - at times shocking, but never graphic for graphic's sake. As a historical account it may be wildly inaccurate, but it is certainly a beautifully written piece of lierature.
This is a fictional account of the life of Lucia Joyce - the daughter of Irish author James Joyce - who trained as a dancer but spent 50 years of her life institutionalised, with varying diagnoses of schizophrenia and cyclothymia (a precursor of bipolar disorder). Very little is known about Lucia. The majority of the letters between her and her father were destroyed, or have been kept out of the public domain. After her father's death in 1941, she appears to have had very little contact with the outside world. She became just another mad woman left to rot in silence, forgotten, in an insitution.
There have been various attempts to chronicle Lucia's life over the years, although this is the first I have read. It is a very clever book. Some of the claims Pheby makes are shocking, although he takes great care to ensure the reader knows they are merely conjecture. However, this book doesn't try to be an accurate biography of a life. What is does is paint a beautiful picture in the reader's mind of a character, a personality, which may or may not have been Lucia's. It hypothesises events that may have shaped that mind, and the opinions that characters surrounding her may have held about her. The focus is not on facts, but on feelings.
I will be interested to see the opinions of those who have read other 'biographies' of Lucia, or even of her father James. I expect this will compare very favourably.
This is a fictional account of the life of Lucia Joyce - the daughter of Irish author James Joyce - who trained as a dancer but spent 50 years of her life institutionalised, with varying diagnoses of schizophrenia and cyclothymia (a precursor of bipolar disorder). Very little is known about Lucia. The majority of the letters between her and her father were destroyed, or have been kept out of the public domain. After her father's death in 1941, she appears to have had very little contact with the outside world. She became just another mad woman left to rot in silence, forgotten, in an insitution.
There have been various attempts to chronicle Lucia's life over the years, although this is the first I have read. It is a very clever book. Some of the claims Pheby makes are shocking, although he takes great care to ensure the reader knows they are merely conjecture. However, this book doesn't try to be an accurate biography of a life. What is does is paint a beautiful picture in the reader's mind of a character, a personality, which may or may not have been Lucia's. It hypothesises events that may have shaped that mind, and the opinions that characters surrounding her may have held about her. The focus is not on facts, but on feelings.
I will be interested to see the opinions of those who have read other 'biographies' of Lucia, or even of her father James. I expect this will compare very favourably.