THE SILENT PATIENT

Theo became a therapist not just because he wanted to help people, but because he knows he’s broken himself. 

 

Theo is fascinated by the psyche and how other people can be more broken by comparison. Theo was abused by his father at a young age, and as a teenager, he attempted suicide. He was able to get out of his dark place with the help of his therapist (Ruth) and his new lover (Kathy, who gave him feelings of lust at first sight).

 

“I didn’t want to die. Not yet; not when I hadn’t lived” (16).

 

“I stopped smoking weed the day Kathy moved into my flat. And -- as Ruth had predicted -- once I was secure and happy, the habit fell away from me quite naturally, like dry caked mud from a boot” (85).

 

“I said a secret prayer during the ceremony. I silently thanked Him for giving me such unexpected, undeserved happiness. I saw things clearly now, I understood His greater purpose. God hadn’t abandoned me during my childhood, when I had felt so alone and so scared -- He had been keeping Kathy hidden up His sleeve, waiting to produce her, like a deft magician” (51).

 

“Unable to come to terms with what she had done, Alicia sputtered and came to a halt, like a broken car. I wanted to help start her up again -- help Alicia tell her story, to heal and get well. I wanted to fix her” (12).

 

………………………

 

After a few years of marriage, Theo stumbled upon Kathy’s open laptop and read emails that revealed that she was cheating on him. 

 

To find out if the emails were real, he secretly followed Kathy to see what she was actually doing when she was supposedly “working late”. Turns out she was meeting up with a man named Gabriel, and the two were romantically intimate. Theo is crushed that the person he idolized wasn’t faithful like he believed, but he also can’t bear the thought of divorcing her.

 

“Kathy hadn’t saved me -- she wasn’t capable of saving anyone. She was no heroine to be admired… This whole mythology of ‘us’ that I had built up, our hopes and dreams, likes and dislikes, our plans for the future; a life that had seemed so secure, so sturdy, now collapsed in seconds -- like a house of cards in a gust of wind” (96).

 

“[Kathy] enjoyed lying and sneaking around: it was like acting, but offstage” (101).

 

“We often mistake love for fireworks -- for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm -- and constant” (101).

 

“Everything built on lies and untruths will fall away. Remember, love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love” (103).

 

“Leaving Kathy would be like tearing off a limb. I simply wasn’t prepared to mutilate myself like that” (107).

 

………………………………….

 

Theo followed Gabriel home and realized that he was also married (to Alicia, 33 years old, for the past 7 years). 

 

Theo saw a similarity to himself and Alicia, so he repeatedly stared at her from outside her house as he pondered how he could enlighten her with the true colors of her marriage. No one believed Alicia that she was sometimes seeing a mysterious disguised man outside her window. They thought she was paranoid, especially considering her unstable background. So she kept it to herself until Gabriel eventually intruded the house. He tied up Alicia, stole Gabriel’s gun (that Alicia hated), and then tied up Gabriel once he got home. 

 

Theo, still in his disguise, gives Gabriel 10 seconds to make a choice: he can die, or he can let Alicia die in his place. Alicia was expecting Gabriel to say he loves her, but instead all he says is that he doesn’t want to die. Next, Alicia hears a gunshot, but it turns out that Theo just shot the ceiling. He didn’t intend to kill anybody; he just wanted to open Alicia’s eyes to how her husband isn’t as faithful as she had believed. Theo then unties Alicia and leaves. 

 

What happens next, Theo didn’t expect. Alicia feels like this is the second time she has been condemned to death. The first time was when her mother got into a car accident and died on the spot at the age of 32. Alicia was also in the car, and her father outright told her that he wished that Alicia would have died instead of her mother. Now, the man who is supposed to love her most is similarly not prioritizing her life. Due to this previous trauma, she picks up the gun and shoots Gabriel in the face 5 times. 

 

For the next few days, Alicia was in a state of shock. She was unable to speak even when she tried. After that, she decided that there was nothing to say, so she remained silent. Before the court date, her only communication was through a painting of Alcestis. At court, it was decided that the only explanation for her murdering her husband out of nowhere and remaining silent afterwards is if she was insane, so she gets sentenced to a mental institution. 

 

Theo hears her story and wants to clean himself of guilt by helping her heal. Alicia eventually suspects that Theo was the disguised man (due to his frame and his sentence choices). She talks to him, but when he realizes that she’s onto him, he drugs her with so much morphine that she gets induced into a coma, which Theo tries to frame as Christian’s doing. At home, Kathy becomes depressed and doesn’t know how to explain that she was cheating, so the two just try to pretend that everything’s fine. Theo didn’t count on Alicia writing the truth in her diary before she went into the coma, so he gets caught. At the end, he catches snowflakes, eluding to his earlier statement that happiness is elusive.

 

“Somehow grasping at vanishing snowflakes is like grasping at happiness: an act of possession that instantly gives way to nothing” (15).

 

“That’s the terrible irony: I did all this to keep Kathy -- and I’ve lost her anyway” (319).

 

……………………..

 

Throughout the book, we wonder a few things:

 

1. Will Alicia ever talk again, or is she a lost cause? What is the good of therapy (especially when the therapist can’t cure himself of his addiction to smoking)?

 

“Diomedes smiled, still with the same sense of amusement. ‘You are not the first. I believed I would succeed. Alicia is a silent siren, my boy, luring us to the rocks, where we dash our therapeutic ambition to pieces’” (32).

 

“‘How can Alicia benefit from therapy if she doesn’t talk?’ // ‘Therapy isn’t just about talking,’ Indira said. ‘It’s about providing a safe space -- a containing environment. Most communication is nonverbal’” (73).

 

“Babyhood is not a time of bliss; it’s one of terror. As babies we are trapped in a strange, alien world, unable to see properly, constantly surprised at our bodies, alarmed by hunger and wind and bowel movements, overwhelmed by our feelings. We are quite literally under attack. We need our mother to soothe our distress and make sense of our experience. As she does so, we slowly learn how to manage our physical and emotional states on our own. But our ability to contain ourselves directly depends on our mother’s ability to contain us -- if she never had experienced containment by her mother, how could she teach us what she did not know?” (85).

 

“It takes time to build trust. My old therapist used to say intimacy requires the repeated experience of being responded to -- and that doesn’t happen overnight” (91).

 

“I wasn’t making progress in any direction, it seemed. Perhaps it was all hopeless. Christian had been right to point out that rats desert sinking ships. What the hell was I doing clambering upon this wreck, lashing myself to the mast, preparing to drown?” (91-92).

 

“Choosing a lover is a lot like choosing a therapist. We need to ask ourselves, is this someone who will be honest with me, listen to criticism, admit making mistakes, and not promise the impossible?” (100).

 

“It is impossible for someone who was not abused to become an abuser. No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it, ‘A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.’ … Rage, like fear, is reactive” (132).

 

2.    Was there actually a man watching Alicia’s house, or was he a figment of her imagination?

 

3.     If there was a man, who was it? Did he kill Gabriel and flee before the police arrived?

 

• Christian: Alicia once attempted suicide. Instead of risking this becoming public knowledge, she got treated privately by Christian, and Gabriel paid him cash under the table for his services. During Alicia’s trial, he never stepped forward to give information about Alicia’s progress. When Alicia was sentenced to the mental institution that he works at, he pretended to not have ever met her. He also advocated to have her highly medicated all the time, as though he was afraid that she might say something bad about him if she had a clear mind.

 

• Max: Gabriel’s brother had feelings for Alicia, but she didn’t return them. So, he pretended that he was disgusted by Alicia and only represented her case because that was what Gabriel would have wanted.

 

“I sense you’re wearing two different hats. The lawyer’s hat, which is understandably discreet. And the brother’s hat. It’s the brother I came to see” (116).

 

“[Gabriel] was mad about [Alicia]. She was just mad” (117).

 

• Jean-Felix: The gallerist was in love with Alicia’s art (more so than he was in love with her). He was heartbroken when Alicia told him that she was planning on switching galleries after the upcoming show, which coincidentally happened to be right around the time of the murder.

 

“[Alicia] was the most interesting person I’ve ever met. Most people aren’t alive, you know, not really -- sleepwalking their way through life. But Alicia was so intensely alive” (151).

 

………………

 

Here are examples of some of Alicia’s paintings:

 

• She depicted the car crash where her mother’s spirit is rising above her dead body.

 

• She depicted her Aunt Lydia (who took care of her after her mother died) as a fat, lazy, old lady in bed.

 

• She depicted Gabriel as being crucified in place of Jesus, since Gabriel was her “savior”.

 

“He saved me -- like Jesus” 61).

 

• She depicted Theo and her as fleeing from the burning insane asylum, but it’s unclear if Theo is rescuing her or about to throw her into the flames.