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imogenrobinson__'s reviews
111 reviews
Manifest: 7 Steps to Living Your Best Life by Roxie Nafousi
I love the idea of writing out every good thing that happened in a day, starting from the moment you woke up, as a way of getting into gratitude journalling when feeling stuck. I've been gratitude journalling for years and never thought of doing this activity, but it sounds super effective!
4.0
Be inspired by the things you see and actively say to yourself, ‘This is something I want. This is something I know I deserve. This is what I am going to manifest.’
When we are inspired by other people’s accomplishments or experiences we show the universe that we believe the world has more than enough love, happiness and success to go around. And so that is what we will attract: more love, more happiness, more success. [...]
If I were to compare myself to everyone else who does something similar to me, or if I allowed myself to feel envious of other people’s success, I would be forever stuck in a scarcity mindset. I would be triggered every single time I saw another person upload a self-development post, write for a magazine, host a workshop or relase a book. Imagine how low my vibe would be if I allowed myself to sit in that space and how suffocating that envy would be! Instead, I choose to actively celebrate the success of others in my industry and I look to them with an honest feeling of awe and inspiration for all the wonderful things they do. I do this because I know, in my heart, that for the thousands of brilliant people out there coaching, teaching and writing, there are a million more people wanting to learn and be helped on their personal-development journeys. I see and believe in the abundance of opportunities to help, inspire and motivate others and so abundance comes to me in return. I don’t want to be the only one, or the best one, I only want to make my own mark in the world, however big or small that might be.
Make the choice to consistently turn your envy into inspiration.
Seek out people who can inspire you and provide proof that it is more than possible to manifest anything that you desire.
Remember that inspiration is a high vibe.
I love the idea of writing out every good thing that happened in a day, starting from the moment you woke up, as a way of getting into gratitude journalling when feeling stuck. I've been gratitude journalling for years and never thought of doing this activity, but it sounds super effective!
More Than a Woman by Caitlin Moran
5.0
Just awesome.
Moran is hilarious and a brilliant writer. She is wise, witty, and comforting to listen to.
Begins with Moran describing the list that women have in their heads: "some things have been on the list since I first fell pregnant, and my youngest is seven now." She refuses to see the list as a burden - it is a guide to life. The list is an apology for what you are not, yet.
I enjoy her musings on morning gratitude: "I'm not homeless, I'm not ill, my family's not ill, it's time for coffee!"
"I love you, can you come now, it's starting to chafe."
"For most women, disliking your body is the default even when they stand there looking unbelievably lovely. It is an eminently possible option to decide to love your body - it’s where you keep all your you. You just have to become a diehard fan of it, like Bowie."
Moran is hilarious and a brilliant writer. She is wise, witty, and comforting to listen to.
Begins with Moran describing the list that women have in their heads: "some things have been on the list since I first fell pregnant, and my youngest is seven now." She refuses to see the list as a burden - it is a guide to life. The list is an apology for what you are not, yet.
I enjoy her musings on morning gratitude: "I'm not homeless, I'm not ill, my family's not ill, it's time for coffee!"
"I love you, can you come now, it's starting to chafe."
"For most women, disliking your body is the default even when they stand there looking unbelievably lovely. It is an eminently possible option to decide to love your body - it’s where you keep all your you. You just have to become a diehard fan of it, like Bowie."
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
5.0
A beautiful book. Very memorable, too. I remembered really enjoying the opening scene and decided to read the whole thing again, as I was feeling on the brink of a Franny-esque nervous breakdown.
Conversations with siblings can be such a comfort in life, and Salinger captures this perfectly through Franny and Zooey's discourse. . The descriptions are also brilliant.
A must-read for anyone experiencing a spot of misanthropy and exhaustion/exasperation with everyone and everything (including yourself).
Conversations with siblings can be such a comfort in life, and Salinger captures this perfectly through Franny and Zooey's discourse. . The descriptions are also brilliant.
A must-read for anyone experiencing a spot of misanthropy and exhaustion/exasperation with everyone and everything (including yourself).
'You think you're a genius?'
[...]
'All I know is I'm losing my mind,' Franny said. 'I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's. I'm sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It's disgusting - it is, it is. I don't care what anybody says.'
Lane raised his eyebrows at that, and sat back, the better to make his point. 'You sure you're just not afraid of competing?'
[...]
'I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete - that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.'
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Also the best, most realistic romance novel I've read in ages. The protagonists are very believable together:
It is also interesting to read about Marianne, a very astute character, as she explores her sexuality:
I didn't love the TV adaptation when I first watched it, but I watched it again after finishing this and it's a real lump-in-the-throat viewing.
5.0
Rooney is an incredibly skilful writer. This is my second read-through and once again, I read it all in one sitting. Rooney picks up on these tiny little details in everyday human interactions and magnifies them in her descriptions. The result is a beautiful, quietly dramatic piece of prose.
Perfect for introspective young people who are trying to figure out what they want to do in their lives:
Perfect for introspective young people who are trying to figure out what they want to do in their lives:
Peggy doesn’t seem to want to work at all. So far this hasn’t been an issue for her, because she meets a lot of men who like to fund her lifestyle by buying her handbags and expensive drugs. She favours slightly older men who work for investment banks or accounting agencies, twenty-seven-year-olds with lots of money and sensible lawyer girlfriends at home. Joanne once asked Peggy if she ever thought she herself might one day be a twenty-seven-year-old whose boyfriend would stay out all night taking cocaine with a teenager. Peggy wasn’t remotely insulted, she thought it was really funny. She said she would be married to a Russian oligarch by then anyway and she didn’t care how many girlfriends he had. It makes Marianne wonder what she herself is going to do after college. Almost no paths seem definitively closed to her, not even the path of marrying an oligarch. When she goes out at night, men shout the most outrageously vulgar things at her on the street, so obviously they’re not ashamed to desire her, quite the contrary. And in college she often feels there’s no limit to what her brain can do, it can synthesise everything she puts into it, it’s like having a powerful machine inside her head. Really she has everything going for her. She has no idea what she’s going to do with her life.
Also the best, most realistic romance novel I've read in ages. The protagonists are very believable together:
The other night Marianne told him that she thought he’d turned out well as a person. She said he was nice, and that everyone liked him. It was a pleasant thing to have in his thoughts. You’re a nice person and everyone likes you. To test himself he would try not thinking about it for a bit, and then go back and think about it again to see if it still made him feel good, and it did.
It is also interesting to read about Marianne, a very astute character, as she explores her sexuality:
It’s not that I get off on being degraded as such, she says. I just like to know that i would degrade myself for someone if they wanted me to. Does that make sense? I don’t know if it does, I’ve been thinking about it. It’s about the dynamic, more than what actually happens. Anyway I suggested it to him, that I could try being more submissive. And it turns out he likes to beat me up […] I mean, I don’t enjoy it. But then you’re not really submitting to someone if you only submit to things you enjoy […] Maybe I want to be treated badly, she says. I don’t know. Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I’m a bad person.
[...]
It was in Connell’s power to make her happy. It was something he could just give to her, like money or sex. With other people she seemed so independent and remote, but with Connell she was different, a different person. He was the only one who knew her like that.
[...]
Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves, says Marianne. I mean when you look at the lives men are really living, it’s sad. They control the whole social system and this is the best they can come up with for themselves? They’re not even having fun.
[...]
Marianne wanted her life to mean something then, she wanted to stop all violence committed by the strong against the weak, and she remembered a time seveal years ago when she had felt so intelligent and young and powerful that she almost could have acheived such a thing, and now she knew she wasn’t at all powerful, and she would live and die in a world of extreme violence against the innocent, and at most she could help only a few people. It was so much harder to reconcile herself to the idea of helping a few, like she would rather help no one than do something so small and feeble, but that wasn’t it either.
[...]
Shame surrounded her like a shroud […] it was as if her life was over. How long had that feeling lasted? Two weeks, or more? Then it went away, and a certain short chapter of her youth had concluded, and she had survived it, it was done.
[...]
You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.
I didn't love the TV adaptation when I first watched it, but I watched it again after finishing this and it's a real lump-in-the-throat viewing.
Saved by the Siesta: Fight Tiredness and Boost Your Health by Unlocking the Science of Napping by Brice Faraut
Lots of interesting information on how taking naps can "cure extreme fatigue, but also combat drowsiness, pain, gloominess, immunological fragility, stress, hypertension, obesity, and cardiovascular disease." And I'm no novice-napper.
Faraut recommends having a bedtime ritual: lower your internal temperature, reduce ambient light, think 'sleep' two hours before turning in as mental preparation helps, and cast off nagging thoughts by scribbling them down on paper.
I liked his analogy of sleep resembling a ride on a local train that stops at four to six stations (cycles) every night. Going to sleep is like catching an old-fashioned train with carriages connected by a gangway. It's quite calming imagining yourself on this little train to The Land of Nod.
We all have an individual chronotype or biological clock - this is our body's natural preference for wakefulness and sleep which changes as we grow older. Sleep requirements are not the same for all generations, and they also vary from one person to another, regardless of age.
Faraut also talks about sleep deficit, and how it makes you far more likely to catch viruses going round, chronic or not. Long-term sleep debt makes you far more vulnerable though. He notes that napping or sleeping in on weekends can help you catch up on sleep, but it can take several days to recover from the negative effects of sleep loss. Some studies suggest incurring sleep debt and making up for it later does not reverse the harm done; that just one hour of sleep debt takes up to four days to repay.
I feel as though napping is a very personal and intuitive practice. I like to allow myself to drop off for one when my body craves it, viewing it as a pick me up. According to Leonardo da Vinci, sleeping and snoozing are conducive to genius. A one-to-two-hour nap helps boost creativity, as it provides us with REM sleep. The post-lunch circadian slump is a good time to take it - the optimal window for a siesta is meant to be 1-4 pm.
4.0
Nowadays, instead of giving sleep its rightful place in our lives, we sacrifice it on the altar of work or subdue it with drugs, or at least food supplements.
Lots of interesting information on how taking naps can "cure extreme fatigue, but also combat drowsiness, pain, gloominess, immunological fragility, stress, hypertension, obesity, and cardiovascular disease." And I'm no novice-napper.
Faraut recommends having a bedtime ritual: lower your internal temperature, reduce ambient light, think 'sleep' two hours before turning in as mental preparation helps, and cast off nagging thoughts by scribbling them down on paper.
There's nothing like deep soothing darkness (at night) and bright sunshine (in the morning) to set our clocks right and help us get out of bed on the right side in the morning.
I liked his analogy of sleep resembling a ride on a local train that stops at four to six stations (cycles) every night. Going to sleep is like catching an old-fashioned train with carriages connected by a gangway. It's quite calming imagining yourself on this little train to The Land of Nod.
We all have an individual chronotype or biological clock - this is our body's natural preference for wakefulness and sleep which changes as we grow older. Sleep requirements are not the same for all generations, and they also vary from one person to another, regardless of age.
The difference between a good night's sleep and a siesta is like the difference between a hike and a stroll: the former takes time and requires preparation, good starting conditions, and clear skies; the latter can be improvised, done under cloudy skies, and even slipped in between storms. You'll get more air and exercise from a hike, and your body will remember it for a longer time, yet you'll still benefit from a breath of fresh air and stretching your legs for a while during a stroll.
He recommends a 'coffee nap' where you drink coffee right before you close your eyes. Caffeine takes about 20 minutes to kick in so dispels sleep inertia after a nap of 20 minutes or more, countering the effects of drowsiness a lot of people experience after a nap, which puts them off from taking one.
It takes four to six hours for half of the caffeine consumed to be eliminated by the brain, and its stimulant effect is cumulative: so if you have some coffee at 9:00 in the morning, the second half of the caffeine will kick in between 1:00 and 3:00 pm - at the very moment you might be downing a second dose to finish off your lunch. [...] ideally, caffeeine should be gone and out of your system by the time you turn in.
Faraut also talks about sleep deficit, and how it makes you far more likely to catch viruses going round, chronic or not. Long-term sleep debt makes you far more vulnerable though. He notes that napping or sleeping in on weekends can help you catch up on sleep, but it can take several days to recover from the negative effects of sleep loss. Some studies suggest incurring sleep debt and making up for it later does not reverse the harm done; that just one hour of sleep debt takes up to four days to repay.
I feel as though napping is a very personal and intuitive practice. I like to allow myself to drop off for one when my body craves it, viewing it as a pick me up. According to Leonardo da Vinci, sleeping and snoozing are conducive to genius. A one-to-two-hour nap helps boost creativity, as it provides us with REM sleep. The post-lunch circadian slump is a good time to take it - the optimal window for a siesta is meant to be 1-4 pm.
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
5.0
Loved listening to this. It's an extremely comprehensive exploration of how technology is having a negative impact on our lives. I like how Newport refers to people who are so quick to talk about the benefits of social media as "techno-apologists". It's true, a lot of people try and wave off the harmful effects these apps are having on the human psyche. Newport describes our phones as addictive, so I suppose it would make sense that many individuals are in denial about the consequences.
He talks about how our compulsive use creates revenue for big tech corporations who are exploiting our Paleolithic instinct to be accepted by the tribe via social approval. I found his discussion of 'pigeon pecking' interesting... it's not guaranteed that we get rewards like dopamine every time we check our phone; it's unpredictable. We're like pigeons continually pecking at a button which only occasionally results in food. There's no pattern to it and that's what makes it so "maddeningly appealing" - it's a slot machine.
His discussion of solitude was fascinating too. It is so uncommon in our digital age for us to switch off: “for the first time in human history, solitude is starting to fade away altogether.” Our generation regularly feels that we need to be consuming information, being productive, and staying connected, therefore it can be challenging to find time to ‘unplug’.
I was pleased he touched on Snapchat streaks and how young people seek to have quantitative proof that their relationships are strong through these unbroken chains of communication. In my opinion, it's so damaging and a good example of how we lose autonomy and control to these machines... sometimes it can feel like we're completely enslaved. It's funny seeing recently how desperate Snapchat have gotten to keep its users engaged. Our time, energy, and attention equals their money, and it's scary watching them scramble to add new features now that interest in the app is waning.
Newport includes practical tips at the end of the book on how to spend your leisure time instead of "cyber-loafing", like fixing something physically on a weekly basis and carving out more time for analogue activities. I liked the case studies he uses of individuals who have discovered newfound happiness upon completing a digital declutter, like a father who has taken to drawing little illustrations for his children's lunchboxes each morning.
He talks about how our compulsive use creates revenue for big tech corporations who are exploiting our Paleolithic instinct to be accepted by the tribe via social approval. I found his discussion of 'pigeon pecking' interesting... it's not guaranteed that we get rewards like dopamine every time we check our phone; it's unpredictable. We're like pigeons continually pecking at a button which only occasionally results in food. There's no pattern to it and that's what makes it so "maddeningly appealing" - it's a slot machine.
His discussion of solitude was fascinating too. It is so uncommon in our digital age for us to switch off: “for the first time in human history, solitude is starting to fade away altogether.” Our generation regularly feels that we need to be consuming information, being productive, and staying connected, therefore it can be challenging to find time to ‘unplug’.
I was pleased he touched on Snapchat streaks and how young people seek to have quantitative proof that their relationships are strong through these unbroken chains of communication. In my opinion, it's so damaging and a good example of how we lose autonomy and control to these machines... sometimes it can feel like we're completely enslaved. It's funny seeing recently how desperate Snapchat have gotten to keep its users engaged. Our time, energy, and attention equals their money, and it's scary watching them scramble to add new features now that interest in the app is waning.
Newport includes practical tips at the end of the book on how to spend your leisure time instead of "cyber-loafing", like fixing something physically on a weekly basis and carving out more time for analogue activities. I liked the case studies he uses of individuals who have discovered newfound happiness upon completing a digital declutter, like a father who has taken to drawing little illustrations for his children's lunchboxes each morning.
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
The arch gets stronger under stress whilst corrective devices (cushioning and gel inserts) in fancy running shoes create new problems by fixing ones that don't exist. They don't reduce impact and shoe companies are a destructive force in that they have wiped out pronation, a natural self-defence movement of the body which is meant to be a good thing: "When it comes to running shoes, all that glitters is not gold."
I'm sticking to walking for the time being though. Until it gets a little warmer!
3.0
McDougall is a sharp writer and I enjoyed his character descriptions of the Tarahumara ultrarunners.
Overall, Born to Run is an interesting book on the beauty of running and all the different reasons people love to do it. I was kind of hoping it would inspire me to pick running up again, but it actually sort of dissuaded me with all the discussion on why humans are designed to run without shoes. According to the book, the best method is to "run barefoot on dewy grass three times a week."
Overall, Born to Run is an interesting book on the beauty of running and all the different reasons people love to do it. I was kind of hoping it would inspire me to pick running up again, but it actually sort of dissuaded me with all the discussion on why humans are designed to run without shoes. According to the book, the best method is to "run barefoot on dewy grass three times a week."
The barefoot walker receives a continuous stream of information about the ground and about his own relationship to it, while a shod foot sleeps inside an unchanging environment.
According to McDougall, feet are looking for a hard surface; they live for a fight and to be worked out as the muscles get stronger after taking a beating.
The arch gets stronger under stress whilst corrective devices (cushioning and gel inserts) in fancy running shoes create new problems by fixing ones that don't exist. They don't reduce impact and shoe companies are a destructive force in that they have wiped out pronation, a natural self-defence movement of the body which is meant to be a good thing: "When it comes to running shoes, all that glitters is not gold."
I'm sticking to walking for the time being though. Until it gets a little warmer!
Undoctored: The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients by Adam Kay
5.0
I enjoyed this just as much as the last book by Kay (this one I listened to on Audible). He is so quick and observant. Again, he made me laugh out loud multiple times. He comes across as a really humble and likeable person to me, too - he genuinely wants to help make a difference and promote lasting change.
Interesting to hear about his time at medical school and the 'communication skills module' he and his peers had to endure, where they learn how to deliver bad news to a patient or a patient's family member. I have often wondered whether medics receive training on how to make sympathetic noises and faces. Kay describes how this training consists of your class laughing at your attempts at delivering bad news to a paid actor behind a one-way mirror, and this is where medical students first learn to put their shields up and not show emotion.
Kay is also very sharp when describing his relationship with his parents: "Not a meal passed where I didn't get a subtle hint I should go back to medicine." As an aspiring writer, I loved hearing about how he persevered at his career in writing/comedy, which he much prefers to medicine because "there is no enquiry when a joke dies." Humour allows Kay to deal with and convey the hard truths of the medical profession.
The book also included important discussions of how hospitals want their doctors to be like machines, and how unsustainable this is for doctors' mental health (every three weeks, a doctor will commit suicide). Kay is brave to open up about his own struggles with sexuality, mental health, trauma, and an eating disorder, in spite of all the stigma attached to these issues...
Overall, Undoctored is a book I would recommend to everyone. I hope to see Kay live on stage someday.
Interesting to hear about his time at medical school and the 'communication skills module' he and his peers had to endure, where they learn how to deliver bad news to a patient or a patient's family member. I have often wondered whether medics receive training on how to make sympathetic noises and faces. Kay describes how this training consists of your class laughing at your attempts at delivering bad news to a paid actor behind a one-way mirror, and this is where medical students first learn to put their shields up and not show emotion.
Kay is also very sharp when describing his relationship with his parents: "Not a meal passed where I didn't get a subtle hint I should go back to medicine." As an aspiring writer, I loved hearing about how he persevered at his career in writing/comedy, which he much prefers to medicine because "there is no enquiry when a joke dies." Humour allows Kay to deal with and convey the hard truths of the medical profession.
The book also included important discussions of how hospitals want their doctors to be like machines, and how unsustainable this is for doctors' mental health (every three weeks, a doctor will commit suicide). Kay is brave to open up about his own struggles with sexuality, mental health, trauma, and an eating disorder, in spite of all the stigma attached to these issues...
Overall, Undoctored is a book I would recommend to everyone. I hope to see Kay live on stage someday.
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
I have always adored the film Coraline. I can still remember the first time I saw the flick: my dad (big movie buff) plonked me down in his study one evening, saying he'd heard good things from critics about a stop-motion kids' animation that had just been released. I watched it on his computer monitor alone in the dark, on a janky free streaming website, and really enjoyed the story. I was also scared shitless.
When you're a child and you have nightmares, the impulse is often to go to a parent for comfort and reassurance. Coraline paralysed me with fear in my bed; I was too frightened to go to my parents, in case I found that their eyes had been replaced with buttons.
As a teenager, I decided to read the novella and was in awe of Gaiman's writing style. There is so much to be learnt from how he writes. He is, in my opinion, an expert at his craft.
Coraline has no siblings to play with and the weather keeps her trapped inside the house her family has just moved to. Her parents are busy, stressed, and overworked. They refer to Coraline as a pest, routinely ignore her, treat her with sarcasm, and remind her with impatience not to make a mess.
The neighbours call her 'Caroline' and she is painfully bored without any friends to keep her company. In the drawing room, which is "only for best" and filled with her grandmother's uncomfortable furniture, Coraline discovers a tiny door. She gets her mother to unlock the door with a key, but it opens to a wall of bricks.
Later, she opens the door again and it reveals a portal. This portal leads to another world where everything is better and less boring. She meets her other mother and other father, who give her the attention she craves. Everyone has buttons for eyes.
The other mother turns out to be a witch; she steals the souls of children who crawl through the tiny door. When Coraline returns to the real world, her real parents are missing.
About a year ago, I read up on how the text can be interpreted as an allegory for narcissism and narcissistic abuse (often referred to as the second-hand smoke of mental health). I think the creators of the film and Gaiman himself must have opened Coraline up to this interpretation, based on the epigraph, and on what Gaiman himself has said about the story:
The other world could easily be read as Coraline maladaptive daydreaming or dissociating, as she is shown to have an active, fertile imagination. Change is difficult for any child to handle and inventing another world could be Coraline's way of coping and processing things.
The film is brilliant for this; the gothic aspects of the other world all have some link to the real world - the bugs she squishes in the shower could have inspired the bug furniture in the other world. Likewise, the button eyes of the doll that Wyborne gives her could have inspired the button eyes in the other world... the other world could be how Coraline, a child, construes her reality, in daydreams.
The other mother wishes to remove Coraline's eyes so that she will stay in the other world forever. The shoe fits perfectly here; victims of abuse are often blinded by love for their abuser - they struggle to accept that what they are experiencing is abuse. The other mother wishes to symbolically blind Coraline, so that she cannot see things with her own eyes anymore.
She expects Coraline to fall for her traps. Narcissists tend to prey on vulnerable, empathic people. They observe what is absent in their lives and offer it up on a silver platter, but they expect something out of their victims; they want total possession, thinking themselves entitled to it. Their true colours always come to light, as they cannot handle it when their victims do not relinquish full control of their lives. The other mother cannot stand Coraline making a decision that isn't mutual, and weaponizes the kind, 'loving' things she does for her.
Nothing is ever enough for a person with narcissistic personality disorder; the other mother eats up children's lives until they are ghosts. She feeds on them and keeps them trapped in her world. They never age and they even forget their names (a very chilling detail, demonstrating Gaiman's mastery of suspense and the horror genre):
I like how far you can go into analysing the film and the book in this way. One of the most important takeaways could be that a victim usually requires the help of those around them to get out of an abusive relationship. Whilst Coraline is an exceptionally brave protagonist, she needs to lean on external parties like the cat (and Wyborne in the film) for support. For instance, her neighbours give her a 'seeing stone' which allows her to see the other world for what it truly is: a lie.
The other father is an interesting character too, as he could be viewed as a co-dependent figure. He is too cowardly to fight back, but he does truly care for Coraline. He is quite literally made to be a monster:
Narcissists are usually very calculating and clever individuals. This is true of the other mother. She plays mind games with Coraline, making her doubt and question herself until she finds it hard to know what is real and what is not:
In spite of this, Coraline manages to overcome all of the challenges the other mother puts her through. She escapes and throws the key to the door down the local well. The well is so deep that Coraline can drop a pebble down it and count to 49 before hearing it hit the bottom.
I think that nowadays, we have to be careful as there's so much pop psychology shared online - similar to mental health awareness, it can be easy to label things in a sort of tick-box exercise after consuming lots of short-form content on a particular subject matter. We live in a world of buzzword bingo - 'gaslight', 'coercion', 'manipulation', 'toxic', 'red flags'... all of these words are tossed around regularly. Social media has made this kind of language widely accessible, which is a good thing, but I do think we have to exercise caution.
Matters can get confusing and complicated when it comes to narcissism: we saw this last year with Jonah Hill, a successful Hollywood star who everyone praises for his down-to-earth nature and weight-loss journey. His ex-girlfriend, Sarah Brady, shared screenshots of their old text conversations in which he employed 'therapy speak' to cover up his controlling behaviour and make Brady out to be the abuser.
This tactic is referred to as DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender) [2], where a narcissist reverses the victim and offender roles to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. We now have a situation where narcissists are well-read on the subject of narcissism, creating a total clusterfuck.
We all have narcissistic tendencies. Someone may behave like a textbook narcissist now and then; their actions may fit into that category and their behaviours may follow a certain pattern. That doesn't necessarily mean they are one and that you can give them that diagnosis. Everyone in life experiences adversity and nobody is perfect. This particularly applies to parents; there is no such thing as a perfect parent. In Philip Larkin's words: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had, and add some extra just for you."
Coraline's real mother and father may be a little neglectful, but they don't want Coraline to cut her knee, or go without her multivitamin. They remind her to dress up warmly and suggest various ways Coraline can keep herself entertained when she complains of being bored. They are far from perfect, but they seem to genuinely care for her wellbeing.
Similar to Chihiro in Spirited Away, Coraline is a child who has to go on a journey to save her parents. Both protagonists become more mature and their independence grows as a result of learning a bit more about parental responsibility and the adult world. They come to recognise that you shouldn't expect perfection from other people. Mr. Perfect from Roger Hargreaves' Mr. Men series springs to mind; Mr. Uppity points out that Mr. Perfect's single most enormous, unbearable, exasperating fault is that he has no faults.
It can be easy to brand someone as a narcissist and forget that relationships are rarely black and white - they are nuanced. But sometimes, things are more black than white, and you have to come to a decision, like Coraline. That is why I personally find this such a powerful story.
When it comes to narcissistic and/or abusive people, often the best option is to lock the door to that relationship for good and throw away the key. Sometimes down a deep, deep well.
5.0
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. - G.K. Chesterton
I have always adored the film Coraline. I can still remember the first time I saw the flick: my dad (big movie buff) plonked me down in his study one evening, saying he'd heard good things from critics about a stop-motion kids' animation that had just been released. I watched it on his computer monitor alone in the dark, on a janky free streaming website, and really enjoyed the story. I was also scared shitless.
When you're a child and you have nightmares, the impulse is often to go to a parent for comfort and reassurance. Coraline paralysed me with fear in my bed; I was too frightened to go to my parents, in case I found that their eyes had been replaced with buttons.
As a teenager, I decided to read the novella and was in awe of Gaiman's writing style. There is so much to be learnt from how he writes. He is, in my opinion, an expert at his craft.
Coraline has no siblings to play with and the weather keeps her trapped inside the house her family has just moved to. Her parents are busy, stressed, and overworked. They refer to Coraline as a pest, routinely ignore her, treat her with sarcasm, and remind her with impatience not to make a mess.
The neighbours call her 'Caroline' and she is painfully bored without any friends to keep her company. In the drawing room, which is "only for best" and filled with her grandmother's uncomfortable furniture, Coraline discovers a tiny door. She gets her mother to unlock the door with a key, but it opens to a wall of bricks.
Later, she opens the door again and it reveals a portal. This portal leads to another world where everything is better and less boring. She meets her other mother and other father, who give her the attention she craves. Everyone has buttons for eyes.
The other mother turns out to be a witch; she steals the souls of children who crawl through the tiny door. When Coraline returns to the real world, her real parents are missing.
About a year ago, I read up on how the text can be interpreted as an allegory for narcissism and narcissistic abuse (often referred to as the second-hand smoke of mental health). I think the creators of the film and Gaiman himself must have opened Coraline up to this interpretation, based on the epigraph, and on what Gaiman himself has said about the story:
Being brave means you are scared, really scared, and you do the right thing anyway.
So now, ten years later, I've started running into women who tell me that Coraline got them through hard times in their lives. That when they were scared they thought of Coraline, and they did the right thing anyway.
And that, more than anything, makes it all worthwhile.
The other world could easily be read as Coraline maladaptive daydreaming or dissociating, as she is shown to have an active, fertile imagination. Change is difficult for any child to handle and inventing another world could be Coraline's way of coping and processing things.
The film is brilliant for this; the gothic aspects of the other world all have some link to the real world - the bugs she squishes in the shower could have inspired the bug furniture in the other world. Likewise, the button eyes of the doll that Wyborne gives her could have inspired the button eyes in the other world... the other world could be how Coraline, a child, construes her reality, in daydreams.
That is kind of the metaphor at the heart of Coraline. She feels neglected by her family and so she dissolves into a world where she is the center [...] Children do disappear into their own worlds because their brain is protecting them from the violence that surrounds them; it doesn't go away. [1]
The other mother wishes to remove Coraline's eyes so that she will stay in the other world forever. The shoe fits perfectly here; victims of abuse are often blinded by love for their abuser - they struggle to accept that what they are experiencing is abuse. The other mother wishes to symbolically blind Coraline, so that she cannot see things with her own eyes anymore.
She expects Coraline to fall for her traps. Narcissists tend to prey on vulnerable, empathic people. They observe what is absent in their lives and offer it up on a silver platter, but they expect something out of their victims; they want total possession, thinking themselves entitled to it. Their true colours always come to light, as they cannot handle it when their victims do not relinquish full control of their lives. The other mother cannot stand Coraline making a decision that isn't mutual, and weaponizes the kind, 'loving' things she does for her.
“There, my sweet Coraline,” said her other mother. “I came and fetched you out of the cupboard. You needed to be taught a lesson, but we temper our justice with mercy here; we love the sinner and we hate the sin. Now, if you will be a good child who loves her mother, be compliant and fair-spoken, you and I shall understand each other perfectly and we shall love each other perfectly as well.”
Nothing is ever enough for a person with narcissistic personality disorder; the other mother eats up children's lives until they are ghosts. She feeds on them and keeps them trapped in her world. They never age and they even forget their names (a very chilling detail, demonstrating Gaiman's mastery of suspense and the horror genre):
'She will take your life and all you are and all you care for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She'll take your joy. And one day you'll awake and your heart and your soul will have gone. A husk you'll be, a wisp you'll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten.'
'Hollow,' whispered the third voice. 'Hollow, hollow, hollow, hollow, hollow.'
I like how far you can go into analysing the film and the book in this way. One of the most important takeaways could be that a victim usually requires the help of those around them to get out of an abusive relationship. Whilst Coraline is an exceptionally brave protagonist, she needs to lean on external parties like the cat (and Wyborne in the film) for support. For instance, her neighbours give her a 'seeing stone' which allows her to see the other world for what it truly is: a lie.
She said, “You know that I love you.” And, despite herself, Coraline nodded. It was true: the other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother’s button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behaviour was no longer amusing.
The other father is an interesting character too, as he could be viewed as a co-dependent figure. He is too cowardly to fight back, but he does truly care for Coraline. He is quite literally made to be a monster:
'Poor thing,' she said. 'I bet she made you come down here as a punishment for telling me too much.'
The thing hesitated, then it nodded. Coraline wondered how she could ever have imagined that this grub-like thing resembled her father. [...]
'Poor thing,' she said. 'You're just a thing she made and then threw away.'
The thing nodded vigorously; as it nodded, the left button-eye fell off and clattered on to the concrete floor. The thing looked around vacantly with its one eye, as if it had lost her.
Narcissists are usually very calculating and clever individuals. This is true of the other mother. She plays mind games with Coraline, making her doubt and question herself until she finds it hard to know what is real and what is not:
'Whatever would I have done with your old parents? If they have left you, Coraline, it must be because they became bored with you, or tired. Now, I will never become bored with you, and I will never abandon you. You will always be safe here with me.'
In spite of this, Coraline manages to overcome all of the challenges the other mother puts her through. She escapes and throws the key to the door down the local well. The well is so deep that Coraline can drop a pebble down it and count to 49 before hearing it hit the bottom.
I think that nowadays, we have to be careful as there's so much pop psychology shared online - similar to mental health awareness, it can be easy to label things in a sort of tick-box exercise after consuming lots of short-form content on a particular subject matter. We live in a world of buzzword bingo - 'gaslight', 'coercion', 'manipulation', 'toxic', 'red flags'... all of these words are tossed around regularly. Social media has made this kind of language widely accessible, which is a good thing, but I do think we have to exercise caution.
Matters can get confusing and complicated when it comes to narcissism: we saw this last year with Jonah Hill, a successful Hollywood star who everyone praises for his down-to-earth nature and weight-loss journey. His ex-girlfriend, Sarah Brady, shared screenshots of their old text conversations in which he employed 'therapy speak' to cover up his controlling behaviour and make Brady out to be the abuser.
This tactic is referred to as DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender) [2], where a narcissist reverses the victim and offender roles to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. We now have a situation where narcissists are well-read on the subject of narcissism, creating a total clusterfuck.
We all have narcissistic tendencies. Someone may behave like a textbook narcissist now and then; their actions may fit into that category and their behaviours may follow a certain pattern. That doesn't necessarily mean they are one and that you can give them that diagnosis. Everyone in life experiences adversity and nobody is perfect. This particularly applies to parents; there is no such thing as a perfect parent. In Philip Larkin's words: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had, and add some extra just for you."
Coraline's real mother and father may be a little neglectful, but they don't want Coraline to cut her knee, or go without her multivitamin. They remind her to dress up warmly and suggest various ways Coraline can keep herself entertained when she complains of being bored. They are far from perfect, but they seem to genuinely care for her wellbeing.
Similar to Chihiro in Spirited Away, Coraline is a child who has to go on a journey to save her parents. Both protagonists become more mature and their independence grows as a result of learning a bit more about parental responsibility and the adult world. They come to recognise that you shouldn't expect perfection from other people. Mr. Perfect from Roger Hargreaves' Mr. Men series springs to mind; Mr. Uppity points out that Mr. Perfect's single most enormous, unbearable, exasperating fault is that he has no faults.
It can be easy to brand someone as a narcissist and forget that relationships are rarely black and white - they are nuanced. But sometimes, things are more black than white, and you have to come to a decision, like Coraline. That is why I personally find this such a powerful story.
When it comes to narcissistic and/or abusive people, often the best option is to lock the door to that relationship for good and throw away the key. Sometimes down a deep, deep well.