Hamnet

by Maggie O'Farrell

He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place.

You, she says, you, do you hear me, I am finished with you. After this time, I will go to your church because I must but I shan’t say a word there because there is nothing after you die. There is the soil and there is the body and it all comes to nothing.

She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.