‘Grand’, back cover. Noelle McCarthy (2022) Penguin Random House New Zealand.

It is a knowledge the admission, no more retracted, of one’s birth, which a young lady tells in the shape of a novel : then is not a narration, easy easy, without any imputation.

Noelle is the name chosen by mom Carol for her daughter and then, by mom herself, a thousand times that name withdrawn, every time that Noelle approaches her, looking at her closely, reminding her the choice of the name. Noelle was born, but she has not been born yet.

Noelle is always a little girl, always a step behind her mother but, if she remains a little girl without partner, her mother’s melancholy is finally removed. Because is precisely the matter of a partner that is not allowed between the two of them, a partner would bring himself - or herself - in trial.

A protection no more vital for the daughter, on the contrary it protects mother’s thoughts from an hypothesis of non-performance : it only asks to stay ‘Grand’.

However the more used word in the novel can also be referred to ‘growing up, becoming grand’ : all of a sudden Noelle uses it like this and without fuss, but now she is already an adult and is about to leave for Auckland, New Zealand from Cork, in Ireland where ‘grand’ is the ‘beforehand’, the very simple and indisputable, what was what is and what will always be. The easiness of a claim which is a unreal – the one that ‘no one but me’ – Noelle collects it to put again in the right place all the ‘others’, who came into her life too and hurriedly were retracted by her and sterilized because the logic couldn’t be admitted : the real life tastes quite different from what you imagine in the absence of partners.

The taste makes grand.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – April 10, 2023

[1] I owe my comment to the conversation with a young woman who offered me the book : then this opportunity is also to thank her.