Gerald's Game

To be completely honest with you, I was not looking forward to writing about Gerald’s Game. Stepping into her world seemed voyeuristic enough, writing about it felt... facetious. I may as well have been lurking in a dark corner of her room with nothing between us but shadows and moonlight as I watched her sleep.

For weeks I struggled against reading this particular novel. The very idea of it made me feel degraded. Yet, it was also one of the books that called to me the loudest. There it was, shouting at me every time my fingertips caressed the spines of the other novels, knowing I would skip over it once again; every time my eyes would dart in its direction, hoping it would somehow disappear... like a bad memory. But bad memories never disappear, do they? Quite the contrary, they tear at your flesh like a cancer and expose you to the very core of who you really are. Ignoring those memories that you so very much try to forget is like trying to forget to breathe.

There is nothing supernatural about this book. No boogeyman lurking under the bed or houses pregnant with restless spirits. There is only the harshest of realities we must face on a day-to-day basis; the reality that sometimes the only monsters we need to fear are the people we want to trust the most. Who wants to face something so horrible as that? Not I.

Which is why when I finally read this book I was grateful. Grateful that I had gotten through it. Grateful that I was not her. Grateful that in all my years as an adolescent, I never had my childhood ripped from me as she did.

I learned two things from this book:

1) No matter how desperately we try to run away from our past, we cannot. It is an inevitable part of who we are and will shape our futures selves no matter how much we don’t want it to. And how we face our past is what makes all the difference between making us better, stronger people or weak, submissive ones.

2) I will never again utter the phrase “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”

I dedicate this toast (I have chosen to toast with a glass of ice-cold water this time) to Prince. Perhaps the only true innocent soul in this sad tale....