If you don't give it to me, I'm gone
With Martha Baillie about her new book that just might break your heart
Martha Baillie and I are at an impasse.
Halfway through our pleasant conversation about her quietly compelling family memoir There Is No Blue (Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Non-Fiction for 2024) I finally steer the conversation towards the elephant in the manuscript: the accusation. Her sister Christina, a life-long psychiatric patient diagnosed with schizophrenia, insisted that their father had sexually molested her—in ways unspecified, and suppressed from memory by their traumatic effect. (And that both parents have been members of a pedophile ring, and much worse.) Christina’s version of what was in Martha’s memory a stable, loving and fairly typical growing up cast a permanent shadow, rewriting happy events—of taking a bath à deux as little girls, for example—into something sinister. Who has copyright over childhood, who gets to say what a family was like? Baillie answer in the book: both of us. Christina has her own version, and this is mine.
You so generously, incredibly generously, I tell Martha, decide that your book will be agnostic on whether the sexual assault happened. You never say, these are the fantasies of a person who’s unwell. Why not?
“Because I can't know,” she says, and the pause fills with espresso machine noises and the chatter of the busy cafe we sit in. “Look at what just happened in France, in the Pelicot case. This woman's being drugged by her husband and raped, unaware of what’s going on. I don’t want the authority… If I think of Alice Munro’s daughter coming to her and saying my stepfather climbed into bed with me and made me put my hand on his penis: she remembers what happened to her and comes to her mother and tells her. But there is nothing concrete in what my sister says.”
“And I didn't want to go down the path of… writing an article about false memory syndrome. I didn't want to read the literature. What I wanted to do was—everyone says I’m generous to my sister, but this is actually me finally saying, now I'm free to tell my experience. And how do you live with this other version? How do you embrace the possibility that there are certain things, major questions, that will remain forever unanswered? Where there is no authority? No one can authoritatively prove that my father didn't molest my sister.”
But we make judgments based on somebody's character, based on their history, I say.
“Yes. But we make judgments…”
You don’t say either yes or no.
“I'm not someone who ever wants to pass a judgment,” she says.
I found it frustrating, I tell her. Though I, the reader, am deciding that your father was unjustly accused based on what I’ve read, so maybe you do tip us gently in that direction. (And here we spend some time discussing the 2023 film Anatomy of a Fall, which does the same thing. Since we follow the woman’s version of events, we consciously or less consciously take her side.)
Still, I found myself thinking, how could she just leave it at that?
“I'm influenced by so many things,” she says. “You know, my partner would also say to me, how can you possibly take seriously what she's saying to you? But she was my older sister. If someone else had been telling me those things, would I have listened to them? Maybe not. But she was the one who knew. She was the one that I would go to when I was 17 and go, which university do I go to? And she’d very logically and clinically walk me through the pros and cons of each in a way that neither of my parents was prepared to do.”
Yes, I get that, in part. I have two much older sisters. How much older was she?
“Only two years. But so here's this highly unstable person, who however had a very logical mind and was very thorough and wanted things to make sense. And that I think was part of her frustration with human beings. We don't make sense and we're not controllable and she wanted control and she wanted logic. We spent so much time together as children, and in our teens, she became an authority for me. I knew she was very smart. I often thought, you figure it out for me. Your brain has the horsepower.” Was she considered the smart one of the family? “Oh, she was driving whatever sports car you want to choose. And I was in, like, a Peugeot.”
That can’t be true, I protest.
“No, but that was my feeling, always. That she was just like–vrrroom. So how do you question that.”
And it was the era, Baillie says, the 1980s, a lot of talk on television and a lot of books being written about multiple personality disorders and mental health memoirs and sexual abuse…
Could she have been influenced by what we now call the satanic panic period in North America, I wonder. “I don’t think she’d read that stuff, but this is when all of this was happening. So did that prime me to say, well, I can't really know for sure, did that influence her? Hard to say. I can't ever know for certain. I can only come to my own conclusions.”
I tell her I admire that ethical choice but I don’t understand it. You leave the conclusion to the reader, but you do show all the ups and downs of shaping a family life around one of its members, and around what needs to be done in order for her to function. Christina moved a lot (conflicts with neighbours were not unusual), decided in midlife that she was a lesbian, frequently cut people out of her life, including her own family. Her one stable, if weary, relationship was with her psychiatrist, who she did consider smarter than most. After returning to her family home, she decided that this was the only safe and comfortable place for her to live. But Martha had to give up her part, and give up the plan to sell it.
In the book, we observe Martha nearing the decision to give up her claim on half of their family home and tell her sister that yes, she can have it. Before this decision was reached, however, Christina took her own life. On one of the walls in the house, she had written reasons for preferring death: “Because of schizophrenia / Because of The Juniper Tree / Because of losing the house.”
“She thought she would be able to stay indefinitely in that house,” says Baillie looking back on it. “But, I mean, I, that's my big regret. If someone bullies me, I resist. And I felt bullied. I didn't feel like I was being asked. She would have had me in her palm, had she just asked. But her approach was, What’s the matter with you? How can you possibly consider not doing this? There was just simply no, I don't really care what this means for you. This is what I want. Give it to me. Period.
And if you don't give it to me, I'm gone.”
Baillie would go home, sit on her front steps and think, OK, I've lived in this house for 30 years. My daughter was born in this house. If I were told tomorrow that I simply had to move against my will, that would be terribly hard. And that would be hard for me in relatively good mental health, with friends, with a partner. I'm asking somebody to leave the place they feel secure with virtually no support. Probably her greatest support is me, and suddenly I'm the enemy because I'm asking her to leave. So part of me would go, this is impossible, this is so ethically wrong, I cannot do this. And then the other part of me would go, no, this is unfair. You can't simply make me do this. And that being unwell doesn't mean that your rights trump mine, period. So I just went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I thought, OK, maybe there will be another discussion and we’ll figure it out.”
And then it was too late.
Christina too had wanted to be a writer, but found herself unable to build any kind of publishing record. The two sisters collaborated on a two-hander a few years ago, Sister Language, with Christina adamantly resisting any attempts to be edited. “She had an amazing mind,” Baillie says. “She was steeped in literature and poetry. She was translating Akhmatova when she was a teenager. Her writing in Sister Language is like a nuclear reactor.”
Christina's fragments that Martha shares with us in There Is No Blue, I have to note, also have this incredible emotional pull.
“She had this understanding of language as not being fixed, as something you should be able to play with. She told herself she was getting at the essence of language. And that the rest of us are sort of in a minor league.”
Did it remind you of anyone, was she influenced by any writers? “Oh absolutely, she was influenced by Gertrude Stein to a huge degree.”
Oh I see… Maybe things like Finnegans Wake?
“That’s where she was at home. Finnegans Wake, she was like a pig in shit. She was totally at home there. That’s not where I’m at home. But people can be. Everybody’s mind works differently.”
There are still people who romanticize mental illness, and argue that it coincides with creative gifts. I’d like to ask them to read There Is No Blue.
“Yeah, there’s no romanticizing. It’s difficult. It makes her life difficult. And it’s difficult dealing with someone so fragile. It’s as though you decided that now you're going to ride around the city with a porcelain vase in your bicycle basket that's going to change how you ride unless you decide you don't care about the vase. At a certain point you might get really frustrated and just go, I’m taking this vase out and I'm leaving it on the sidewalk. You know? And good luck vase.”
There Is No Blue is in bookstores now. The Incident Report (2009), a good gateway drug to Baillie’s fiction, Sister Language (2019), If Clara (2017) and The Search for Heinrich Schlogel (2014) are all available in Coach House Books online shop.
