Alias Grace

by Margaret Atwood

but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.

I say, Then I suppose you are here to measure my head. I would not dream of it, he says, smiling; but still, he glances at my head with a measuring look.

I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.

She is not afraid of me, she doesn’t mind me or care what I may have done, even if I killed a gentleman; she only nods, as if to say, So that’s one less of them.

She has the alarmed, slightly pop-eyed look that signals either an overly nervous disposition or a disease of the thyroid.

There is a little verse I remember from a child: Needles and pins, needles and pins, When a man marries his trouble begins. It doesn’t say when a woman’s trouble begins.

Aunt Pauline was always telling her to stand up to my father, and my father would tell her to stand up to Aunt Pauline, and between the two of them they squashed her flat.

And then all was over, so quickly, and the next day went on as before, only without my mother. That night I took one of the lemons and cut it up, and made each of the children eat a piece of it, and I ate a piece of it myself. It was so sour that you felt it must be doing you good. It was the only thing I could think of, to do.

I wished to make butter from it later in the day if there were no thunderstorms about, as butter will not come when there’s thunder.

???

On the palm of my hand there’s a disaster. I must have been born with it. I carry it with me wherever I go.

and I fainted dead away in the upstairs hall, and the chambermaid went into a panic, and threw a vase of flowers over me, water, vase and all;