Unreliable narrator

• The graceful image of the human body arises precisely, here, in the loss of any referential particularity.
• The graceful image of the human body arises precisely, here, in the loss of any referential particularity.
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  Ian McEwan's Lessons, his most autobiographical novel, is a new experiment in vulnerability

Creative synchronicity

• Caruth’s example describes the synchronicity inherent in the artistic creation.
• At the same time, it recognises that “direct or phenomenal reference to the world means, paradoxically, the production of a fiction”.
• Their anniversary is a moment for the couple to reflect on all they have achieved together, but also for resentments to build.
• Rather like an Ian McEwan novel, The Anniversary depicts this moment of high drama in its first few pages.
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Traumas and losses

• J.B.’s life has been punctuated by a series of traumas and losses, including, most prominently, the disappearance of her mother when she was just a child.
• At the same time, J.B.’s memories of those experiences have become blurred, not only by the passing of time, but by her fictionalisation of them.
• For example, J.B. records her niece saying: “Tell him, Lucie – she might have even said Aunt Lucie at this point”.
• It is a subtle correction, but one that catches the reader – well, what did she say, we wonder.
• And if J.B. cannot get this detail correct, what else might she be misremembering or failing to record?
• […] I could not tell them that all too often I doubt my own version of events.
• A probing profile article refers to her migrant parents, her father’s life in India, her childhood in the Australian bush.
• One gets the sense that J.B. is finely crafting her life for us, painstakingly editing, revising the manuscript of her experiences.