More down than up

In one of the stories in this collection, a woman whose sister has died of anorexia remembers ‘an incident when she was maybe eight and I was twelve’ when the little girls encountered a flasher:

. . . it sort of jumped out and curled up, in a way that I now might recognise. At the time it looked like giblets, the same colour of subdued blood, dark and cooked, like that piece of the turkey our parents liked and called ‘the pope’s nose’.

Is this a reminiscence, conscious or otherwise, of the metaphor in The Bell Jar, when the boyfriend of Sylvia Plath’s heroine offers to let her ‘see’ him?

Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and gizzards and I felt very depressed.

Most popular

Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

In Taking Pictures, all the narrators and protagonists, except one, are female; all are at least slightly mad; and all sound like Sylvia Plath.