Delicate Condition

“It made me think of some of the crueler things fans had said about me online, things about the wrinkles around my eyes, or my hair, which was already starting to grey. Things designed to cut me down, as though people were offended by the fact that a woman my age could still be successful.”

The success of The Auteur forces Anna into the public’s view in a way that proves entirely uncomfortable. This quote demonstrates the intersection of ageism and misogyny that characterizes how the anonymous public views and talks about successful women.

“I felt delicate, almost breakable. It was as though someone had reached into my body and gotten my internal organs twisted between their hands, wringing me out like a dish towel.”

Throughout the novel, Valentine uses evocative and often unexpected comparative language to give shape to Anna’s pain. Here, the image of Anna as an inanimate object subject to the violence of an outside force gives a sense of how disempowered Anna feels within her own body.

“I stayed in the kitchen for a few minutes after he’d left, going over everything I’d done the night before, searching for gaps in my memory. I couldn’t think of any, but that’s the thing about not being able to remember something, isn’t it? You don’t know that you’re not remembering. The picture in your head feels like the truth, even if it’s a lie.”

This passage demonstrates the mental gymnastics Anna puts herself through in order to reconcile her memories with the version of reality that Dex and her doctors present her with. Anna is willing to accept the idea that her own memory might be faulty before she disbelieves the input of the men around her.

“Now, my eyes kept drifting to the children’s drawings taped behind the apartment windows, the folded-up strollers leaning against the front doors of brownstones. I felt a deep, yearning ache.”

In this passage, Anna’s desperation for pregnancy is intertwined with the imagery of a stalker or home invader intruding on the domestic lives of the families on her block. Anna’s gaze presses into the interiors of her neighbors’ homes as she tries to perceive what life with a child could be like; her yearning is tied to horror, even this early in the novel.

“Every doctor I saw before Dr. Hill told me my body was working perfectly normally, that there was no reason I shouldn’t have been able to get pregnant. It was infuriating, knowing there was something wrong and not being able to get anyone to listen.”

This passage underscores that Anna has been disbelieved and belittled not just by the medical establishment shown on the page, but by all of the doctors she’s seen previously. Valentine uses details like this one to give a sense of the totality of Anna’s struggle with the medical establishment.

“It happened when you were a public person, but I’d always suspected it happened more when you were known for something like Spellbound.”

Much of the novel’s opening is concerned with the consequences of Anna’s sudden entrée into the public eye. Anna’s new identity as a “public person” opens up dangers that she never previously had to consider. Her sudden visibility plays into questions of perception and autonomy versus passivity, which are especially relevant to the theme of Patriarchal Institutions’ Failure to Acknowledge Female Pain.

“Sometimes it felt like the continuation of our species was an ongoing experiment being performed on the backs of women. Or on our wombs.”

The reference to “experimentation” here isn’t figurative. This language foreshadows the realization Rayna Perkins will have in her interlude about the treatment of Black women by the founders of her field of medicine.

“Of course, that’s not what happened. But sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t stop my mind from obsessing, wondering if I should have done anything differently, it’s nice to imagine that it did.”

Though Anna’s narration is largely chronological, the Prologue makes clear that this narrative voice is from a future Anna, to whom the events of the novel have already happened. Valentine occasionally adds asides from the viewpoint of this future Anna, typically to enhance suspense or create tension.

“Women like her—women who were so obviously in tune with their own bodies—had always made me strangely insecure. After two years of trying to get pregnant, my body was more a mystery to me than ever.”

This passage demonstrates how frank Anna is in exposing her insecurities. Though Anna craves female friendship, she’s honest with herself about the ways in which other women in her life make her insecure about herself. This observation adds dimension to the theme of The Necessity and Limits of Female Friendship, emphasizing the diversity and nuance in relationships among women.

“If you leave your trash outside overnight, you don’t blame the bear who comes by and rips it open, drawn by the smell. You blame yourself.”

In this passage, Anna blames herself for being a “public person” and potentially drawing the attention of people like Meg to herself. This passage draws on the motif of dead animals and the predator/prey framework that Anna so often uses to conceptualize her relationship to the world. At this stage in the novel, she still sees herself as the prey.

“I wanted to explain the things that weren’t physical, the things you would never understand unless you’d gone through it. My personality had changed. The second I saw that second line, half of my brain had just turned off, like a thrown breaker, the electricity on that side of my mind going dark. That part of my brain, the dark part, was focused on the baby, always. Even now that she wasn’t there anymore.”

In this excerpt, which features one of the novel’s most evocative similes, Anna explains how the experience of becoming pregnant transforms her. The imagery of the baby darkening half of Anna’s brain is unexpected. Typically, children are portrayed as opening new doors for mothers or as allowing their parents access to new depths of feeling. The “darkness” caused by Anna’s pregnancy, in contrast, conjures the totality with which the growing fetus changes Anna’s worldview—and how suddenly this change occurs.

“I’ve just always wanted to be a mother. My mom died when I was little, and I never got a chance to know her. I guess I want a do-over on the whole mother-child relationship thing.”

Anna struggles to find connections to other women in her life. Her view of pregnancy as a way of “doing over” the mother-child relationship, and thereby reconnecting with a past she never had, speaks to how profoundly she misses those connections in her daily life.

“The pain felt good. It reminded me of the burning feeling I got in my toes and fingers when they started to defrost after going numb in the cold. Sometimes being alive hurt like hell.”

This passage begins to dig into Anna’s complicated relationship with pain. Anna has learned to live with pain in parts of her life outside of her pregnancy. Here, she uses physical pain as a way of moving her mind away from the emotional pain elicited by Siobhan’s cancer recurrence.

“I should’ve been terrified to be alone; I should’ve been huddling up next to my security guard, my husband, desperate for someone big and strong to protect me.

Instead of feeling scared, I felt angry.”

At this moment in the story, Anna realizes that Dex and the other men she’s surrounded herself with, like Kamal, can’t solve the problem she’s facing. This realization spurs Anna into becoming a more active protagonist and taking on more agency in solving the mystery of her miscarriage/pregnancy. Accordingly, it marks a milestone within the theme of Monstrosity as Female Survival, with Anna beginning a shift in self-perception from prey to predator.

“It seemed unfair that it was still there, this pouch, that it hadn’t disappeared the moment I’d miscarried.”

This is an example of how expertly Valentine renders the grief and terror of miscarriage through concrete physical detail. Here, Valentine uses Anna’s sense of embodiment to demonstrate the physical weight of her loss.

“‘It sounds like you’re saying I’m having a hysterical pregnancy,’ I said, cutting him off.’”

This conversation between Anna and Dr. Crawford illustrates the ineffective, insensitive communication that characterizes doctor-patient interactions in the medical establishment. Dr. Crawford speaks to Anna as though she is a child, giving overly simple and insufficient explanations. Anna’s line of dialogue here demonstrates the sharpness she has learned to utilize as a result of these types of interactions.

“I made myself smile. This didn’t feel real. It was like being on a movie set, like I was playing a character, Anna the actor instead of Anna the expecting mother. It took every acting trick I knew to shift my brain off the baby for long enough to react the way I knew I was supposed to.”

Here, Valentine uses Anna’s profession to show how the character conceptualizes dealing with difficult interpersonal interactions. Anna sees many of her interactions with Dex as primarily performative.

“Dex squeezed my hand. He was crying. Big fat crocodile tears rolled down his cheeks.”

This moment marks a distinct shift in Anna’s perception of Dex. Dex begins crying as it’s revealed that Anna is, in fact, still pregnant, but Anna immediately assesses these are “crocodile tears.” Here, she begins to assume that Dex is insincere and motivated more by his own self-interest than actual concern for their child.

“Years later, I would think back at that moment and marvel at the mental gymnastics I was able to perform, the sheer force of will it had taken for me to push the memory of the raccoon—of what I’d wanted to do to that raccoon—out of my head.”

Though most of the novel is written from Anna’s point of view in the moment, Valentine sometimes chooses to break away from this perspective, instead moving into Anna’s point of view from after the events of the book. This narrative technique allows Anna to rationalize or explain actions that she wouldn’t be able to explain in the moment, such as in this passage in which she erases the thoughts of her desire to eat the decaying raccoon.

“For a moment, I felt like my body had been taken hostage, like all my actions were being controlled—not by the baby inside me, but by the people tasked with keeping her healthy.”

The evocative imagery here figures Anna as a prisoner, someone who has lost all of her own agency because of her pregnancy. The hostage/captor metaphor suggests the extent to which Anna feels entirely at the mercy of Dex and the doctors. It also complements the motif of animals, which often draws on the similar dynamic of prey/predator to situate Anna’s current mental state.

“I’d read somewhere that when pregnant women didn’t get enough calories, their bodies automatically fed the baby first, leaving the mother to starve. If that wasn’t a perfect metaphor for pregnancy, I didn’t know what was.”

This “metaphor for pregnancy” that Anna recounts is a horrific one. It conjures images of the baby as something monstrous, something that destroys the mother. This metaphor also figures the woman’s own body as something outside of her control and, in this instance, working against her best interests. This combination of monstrosity and loss of agency is a central dynamic in the novel.

“We were just wombs to him, just things. He didn’t love us. He didn’t even see us as people.”

At this stage in Anna’s emotional journey, she no longer rationalizes Dex’s abusive and thoughtless behavior. This succinct and cutting assessment of Dex’s motives shows that Anna fully understands that Dex is not a beneficial presence in her life.

“I seized her hands, moaning. ‘No…no, we can’t…I need him…I—’”

In this passage, Anna worries about not having Dex near as she gives birth. This dialogue comes only a few chapters after the previous quote, in which Anna acknowledges Dex’s abusive attitude toward the women in his life. This bit of dialogue demonstrates how complicated Anna’s relationship with Dex is, and how emotional dependencies aren’t severed in clear-cut ways.