Review: I’m Sorry You Feel That Way by Rebecca Wait
Shortlisted for the 2023 Nota Bene Prize, I’m Sorry You Feel That Way is a compelling domestic comedy about complex family dynamics, mental health and the intricacies of sibling relationships.
For Alice and Hanna, saint and sinner, growing up is a trial. There is their mother, who takes a divide-and-conquer approach to child-rearing, and their father, who takes an absent one. There is also their older brother Michael, whose disapproval is a force to be reckoned with.
There is the catastrophe that is never spoken of, but which has shaped everything. As adults, Alice and Hanna must deal with disappointments in work and in love as well as increasingly complicated family tensions, and lives that look dismayingly dissimilar to what they'd intended.
They must look for a way to repair their own fractured relationship, and they must finally choose their own approach to their dominant mother: submit or burn the house down.
And they must decide at last whether life is really anything more than (as Hanna would have it) a tragedy with a few hilarious moments.
REVIEWED BY GEORGIE STEDMAN
This is an excellent book; excellent in so many ways but excellent in specifically pointing at social anxiety. It sits with Sorrow and Bliss as one of the best books I have read about mental illness and family structure.
The characters are fully developed and rounded — you feel despair at their choices and utterly saddened by their circumstances and fate. It is painful by small degrees. These ghost-like characters are Celia, Hanna, Alice and Micheal, haunted by family illnesses and personal traumatic experiences focused around death, expectations to succeed, and the struggle to socially belong.
The novel is an excellent example of uncovering mental illness, involving the reader in the excruciating step-by-step process of being entirely swallowed by mental fatigue and loss of control. The prose is careful and considered in explaining the generations of the family’s trauma, from either being diagnosed with schizophrenia or psychosis or watching it unfold in their relatives. Stigma is eradicated, particularly around schizophrenia.
Each chapter is heartbreaking and delivers a different short story, jumping in and out of the years of grief, social isolation and individual struggles of the family. It was almost unbearable to read a book that has two twin sisters with a fractured relationship, knowing that my relationship as a twin is rewarding and secure. The lonely gaps between mothers and children and the air between siblings expose these lost characters and the repercussions of “fitting in” with friends and in relationships that it cyclically creates. The social pressures of being liked are so resonant and powerful and will be relevant to so many people.
Rebecca Wait’s writing is eloquent, affecting and unflinching - she is brilliant. Oh, and my favourite parts are when they awkwardly talk about the weather because it’s so, so British and painful.