Grace Williams Says It Loud

This could have been a relentlessly miserable story. Grace is born in the mid-1940s into a family and a society that does not know how to care for her. She is born with multiple disabilities which polio exacerbates, and at the age of 11 she is sent to an institution called the Briar.

Grace is completely isolated by an inability to communicate. She is treated at the Briar Mental Institute as 'ghastly', 'animal', 'monstrous', but the reader learns from the sharp and startling first person narration what Grace is unable to say out loud.

We see the novel through Grace’s eyes, which makes reading her story a sometimes frustrating and upsetting but very powerful experience. The reader feels an enormous sense of identification with Grace, because her perspective becomes ours. We are given access to Grace’s mind – her keen sense of observation, her wordplay, her wit. Because Grace cannot communicate, we feel that only we know what she is really like. (To the Institute, she is a certain type of mental defective, nothing more.) Only we know, until Grace meets Daniel.

Daniel is another patient at the Briar who becomes Grace’s friend and lover, and their relationship is described with tenderness, humour and poignancy. Daniel sometimes acts as Grace’s voice in the novel, expressing some of the thoughts that previously only the reader had access to. (Henderson handles incredibly well the technical difficulties of writing a novel in which the main character barely speaks.)

There are some very painful passages, particularly early on when Grace arrives at the Briar and is discussed in cold, dismissive terms even as she sits in the room by the doctor and nurse examining her. But throughout the novel, and throughout all the treatments, routines and unkindness of the Briar, Grace’s wit and her idiosyncratic, poetic way of describing the world continue to surprise and enthrall us.