Author(s): Thomasin Sleigh

Novel | Aotearoa Fiction | Read our reviews! | Lawrence & Gibson

Hold up your phone to take a photo and some people won’t be there. Look for them in older images and their bodies are gaps, the rest of the photo still busy around them. People have stopped appearing in photographs. First a handful, then many more. Does this new, troubling group pose a threat?

From their home in Whakatāne, Jodie Pascoe and her daughter Jade watch as the number of gaps grows. While protecting Jade, Jodie searches for a friend from the past, Miri, who will help her navigate the collapsing present.

The Words for Her is an arresting story about how photographs bind us together and what happens when those binds fall away.

It seems that we have become dependent on photographs for our memories, for our identities, even for our authenticity. This fascinating novel explores what would happen if people started to become unrecordable by media, to disappear from photographs, to become gaps in a world in which image has become a substitute for actuality. The novel succeeds both because there is so much packed into it to think about (how we see, how we remember, the relationships between words and images, and the pictures we make in our heads of the fictional or of the actual) and because it is a superb portrayal of an ordinary life in a small town in Aotearoa and how that ordinary life is impacted as what we had thought of as reality begins to change in ways that we can neither control nor understand.

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STELLA'S REVIEW:
They are there, but they are not. They are ‘gone’. They are gaps. Gaps in the photographs. Unseen by your phone. They have changed. Think this sounds surreal? It’s compelling. If you are going to read one novel this year, make it this one. The Words for Her is a master class in blending intriguing and intelligent ideas about images and words with the realist grit of surviving as a solo parent in a small provincial town; complete with a twist of dystopia and societal collapse. The collapse, a chaotic slow-motion act, is triggered by people disappearing; that is, their images disappearing. No longer uploadable, missing from their social media profiles, leaving gaps in family photographs, no longer present — no record — at social gatherings. This is a story of a mother protecting her daughter, of the power of words to create a picture, and of the intense relationship we have with the recorded, particularly digital, image. Out-sourcing our memory is possibly the crime of our times. How many times a day do we reach for our phone? How many photos do you have stored in the cloud or on file of family, friends, or yourself? How entrenched are we in the idea of who we are through the images of ourselves? If you couldn’t record yourself or your loved ones, would you feel bereft? In The Words for Her, Jodie is uneasy. She senses something lurking within her, playing at the corners of her mind. But is it a terrible thing? That she has a gift for description has helped more than one person in her life. For her friend, Miri, it released her from a bad relationship; disappearing gave her the opportunity for a new life. For her blind father, Jodie’s ‘colouring’ brings the world to life through intricate wordplay. This is so clever to read in a work of literature. For this is what reading does — creates images where we can wander. Jodie will protect Jade, her daughter, even if it means 'going out'. But can she? As danger lurks closer, someone knows what she can do, this mother has to make a choice from which there may be no return. The first time they notice a gap is while watching the news — the presenter fades away, her hands gripping the edge of the desk until they too go. The camera pans away. At first, it is strangers, then people related to someone you know, then celebrities, and then it will be someone close to you. As more people go 'out', the division between the Gaps and the Presents beds in. If you are 'present', you feel compelled to prove it. Billboards go up everywhere with smiling ‘present’ people. The Gaps seek out their own kind as they are shut out of society. There’s a shame to being 'gone', and practical problems. No longer scannable. No image on your driver’s license. Your newborn is ‘invisible’. Thomasin Sleigh brings us a wealth of ideas — even as you are carried impulsively and enjoyably forward with the plot — which are intriguing, complex (yet not inaccessible), and thought-provoking. This is my favourite kind of novel, one which layers ideas and story-telling where both the quotidian and the speculative edge against each other to reveal our present with a fresh, intelligent perspective.