When someone you love takes their own life, guilt is unavoidable; when they hold you responsible, guilt is off the scale. The sister of Canadian novelist Martha Baillie, Christina, killed herself at 61. On the wall, in blue marker, she’d written three reasons for wanting to die: “Because of schizophrenia / Because of The Juniper Tree / Because of losing the house”. The schizophrenia went a long way back; she’d first attempted suicide in her 20s. By “The Juniper Tree” she meant a Brothers Grimm fairytale in which a child is killed by one parent and fed in a stew to the other, much as Christina felt she had been, believing herself to be a victim of domestic abuse. But it was the third reason that weighed on Martha, who’d been the one keen to sell the family house in Toronto, despite Christina telling her, in front of a psychiatrist: “If I’m forced to leave the house as soon as Mom dies, you’ll just find a body.”
The book is a trilogy of essays about an ordinarily dysfunctional middle-class family, “a dog chasing its own tail”. Death is its starting point and the source of its best aphorisms. “Were life a cartoon, being punched by the death of a person you love would make you see stars,” she writes; it’s “the sweeping tug of a train entering a station, attempting to draw everyone from the platform”. The first essay recounts the death of her mother, an artist, at the age of 99; the second looks back on the life of her father, a mathematics professor, who was “rescued from loneliness” when he married at 41. Martha remembers both parents fondly, recalling how her mother professed “I love you always” and presenting her father as a kindly man devoted to trees and animal welfare. But in the long third essay Christina’s suicide drives her back to childhood to reassess them.
“Familiar is a word I allow,” Christina wrote in her journal (only parts of which Martha can bear to read), “Family is not.” At three, her mother stabbed her in the eye with a needle – or so Christina believes, convinced that the operation she had for a wandering eye was merely a cover. To Martha the stabbing seems unlikely. She felt the less favoured of the two children: the daughter their mother indulged and most wanted to please was Christina, “in whom she saw herself”. She’s bemused at how their upbringing could have made her sister think that their parents belonged to a circle of Nazi paedophiles. But she’s patient, as the mediator, when Christina scorns and refuses to speak to their mother. And she pushes herself to the borders of psychobabble in her efforts to understand (“That Christina felt stabbed in the I makes sense to me”).
With her father, it’s harder: could he really have molested Christina? A school janitor made a pass at her when she was 13 and it seems she projected that offence on to her Dad. He certainly spanked her when she defied him, taking her over his knee. But he spanked Martha too and so did their mother – to them it was standard childrearing practice. More culpable was his animosity towards the teenage Christina: they’d argue and she’d get the better of him but, as a “poor loser” who felt disrespected, he’d nag and find fault, failing to allow for her fragility.
She was certainly fragile. “If only I hadn’t fallen in love with death when I was so young,” she wrote in a journal. She cut herself with his razors and with broken bottles. She developed anorexia, was diagnosed with PTSD, had hallucinations and suspected she was on the autism spectrum. Though in love with a woman, she married N, a painter, and while his career took off her ambitions as a writer dwindled; for relief she took to collecting antique dolls and would sometimes speak in “their” voices. In returning from Victoria to Toronto, after the marriage ended, she hoped to be freer to express her lesbianism. But as her fear of people increased, the only relationships seem to have been with her sister, mother and psychiatrist, Dr R. Off medication, against Dr R’s wishes, Christina became more erratic. She turned up at the library where Martha worked in different guises, a bearded old man one day, a skinny British woman another.
Martha owns up to childhood rivalry with her sister and to a battle of wills about selling the house. But she also looked after Christina, checking in on her, organising repairs and collaborating with her on a book. Christina’s writing, extensively quoted, verges on the indecipherable, blurring the line between animate and inanimate, but Martha untangles and defends it: “In James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake she could relax.” She knows she’ll never find out why a shared childhood should have had such different outcomes; the only truth she arrives at will be variable and of her own making. Still, the “disobedient tale” she tells is tough, tender and compelling.
In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 and the domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the US, the suicide prevention lifeline is at 988 and the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org
There Is No Blue is published by Granta (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
