This book was great. It was strange, unique, dark, funny and thought provoking. It's a quick read and I really recommend checking it out. Trigger warnings for a lot of things, including self harm, suicidal thoughts, sexual abuse etc. ( )

From the look of this book, I was expecting casual young adult fiction, but it was neither a casual story nor YA lit. Relatively short, at only 238 pages, the novel was intense, serious with subtle touches of humor, and beautifully written. Gibb covers some intense subject matter, such as the sexual abuse and mental illness of the protagonist, and handles it adeptly — the protagonist’s emotional state is convincingly bleak, but without turning the novel into a suffocating wasteland.

Some quotes:

“I was born into a crowded room at St. Mary Abbot’s hospital, South Kensington, in 1968. Born in London into a month of nights and days only distinguishable form one another by degrees of grey. Born into a nation that regarded the delivery of new life as embarrassing and unseemly, that operated a National Health Service which viewed birth as a pathology necessitating a ten-day internment.
“In Grade One, when I was given a fresh clean notebook in which to write something called ‘My Autobiography,’ I wrote according to the certainty of the collective narrative: ‘I was born purple and dead. I was born in England,’ as if to imply that birthplace determined birth state. In fact, as my mother describes, it it may well have. I did not burst forth into being, I was pumped into existence by a machine. Although I was the result of premature ejaculation, I was not overly excited about being released into the world.” (pp. 10–11)

“Perhaps I’d missed the point or spoiled her one attempt at female bonding, but she rummaged around in the bathroom closet and thrust a box of tampons at me.
“‘Thanks, Mum,’ I said. ‘But I won’t be needing these.’ She does not realize that I have just decided never to have a period. No thank you very much, I am just not interested in going that route. You can take these straight back to wherever they came from.” (p. 86)

“ ‘You should do something with your hair,’ Binbecka has started to say to me. ‘It’s not becoming. Do something like mine. And clean your nails. What’s wrong with you, Thelma? Don’t you want boys to like you?’ she asks me.
“No. I don’t want to paint my lips in Silver City Pink, pull up my kilt and fold it over at the waist, or press my face to the wire fence and giggle through to the other side. I don’t understand this new language where I am supposed to say mean things about my friends like, ‘Oh my gawd, she’s like, such a bitch,’ and then spend three hours that night on the phone with her talking about boys. I don’t understand.” (p. 87)

“That was it for me. Since I couldn’t be adopted myself; since I couldn’t seem to embrace a religion or a lover because that would involve ghastly deeds for which I was quite unprepared; since I couldn’t adopt a child, or a cause, or a nation, I became a lawyer, or rather, I adopted the idea of the profession. It would take me many many more years to actually become a lawyer. I still had all my madness to get through, after all, but at least the declaration was the start of something. While everybody around me was so preoccupied with their bodies—their breasts, their exotic dancing, their ‘bonking’—I would devote myself to logical arguments and Faustian bargains. Of course it didn’t occur to me that as an anorexic I was probably the one most preoccupied with my body. I thought that I had transcended my body by refusing to yield to its basal demands. I wasn’t really going to make much of a lawyer until I could come to terms with the fact that I inhabited both a mind and a body. At least if I focused my mind I’d inhabit something.” (p. 113)

“ ‘I do have a date, as a matter of fact,’ I say. Just not the kind of date she imagines, where a guy picks me up in his car and I wear a miniskirt and heels and I listen to him talk about himself all night and then he pulls out his Visa and then his penis shortly thereafter and I feel like I can’t protest the latter because I haven’t protested the former.” (p. 201)

“We are moving in each other’s shadows, taking delicate steps at fifty-degree angles, peering out occasionally to catch the sun in each other’s hair. It involves talking into the early hours of the morning on benches outside pubs after closing. Holding hands and speaking softly and sharing little details hitherto housed in a bulging file of secrets. It is lovely and I am becoming braver. I think this man is my boyfriend. I think I am in something called a relationship. It is hard for me to know if I am, because I do not know what it must be, but perhaps there are just not enough words in English to describe this kind of arrangement. Arrangement. As if it has order, a structure somehow.” (p. 147–8)

apparently i read this in late 2002 or early 2003. i have absolutely no recollection of doing so. the book seemed entirely new to me. i think that bodes ill. ( )

What an odd book that I couldn't quite put down. The main character of the story who is abused by her father from a young age, takes us with her through her sometimes coherent and sometimes incoherent journey through life. We meet her invisible friends, join in her dreams/nightmares and hear her inner thoughts. At times the story follows a path and what you are reading makes sense and at other times you have just no idea however this creatively mimics the ups and downs of the characters life and mental health. ( )

Simply, 'Mouthing The Words' resonates. I would wager that even for those readers who hadn't shared similar experiences as the protagonist, Thelma, Gibb's writing is such that Thelma's journey is accessible and understandable - even through the madness.

The focus is removed from the events of the abuse itself, and instead the reader watches Thelma develope her own defence mechanisms - imaginary friends/split personalities, numbness and dissociation to name a few (all psychologically normative responses to severe trauma). Watching the development of these defences as they emerge through her childhood is fascinating, disturbing and extremely poignant.

In Thelma's early adulthood these mechanisms collapse into a harrowing period of full-fledged mental illness and Gibb's skill really comes through. People who suffer from such illnesses find it hard to recognise themselves as ill, and, true to this, Thelma moves gracefully through a sanely-crazy reality. One gets the feeling that she is thinking clearer than ever before throughout this time. I imagine that is a hard perspective to write from, and Gibb has mastered it.

Unlike too many novels that deal with tragedy or trauma through melancholic pathos, 'Mouthing The Words' is written with a literary integrity that entitles Thelma to transcend a one-sided, crippled object of pity. Instead she is alternately funny, naive, cold, loving and always utterly screwed.

As the title suggests much of the imagery centres around Thelma and silence - external and internal silences, frustrated communication, mouths as sexual weapons, words as tools. This imagery forms the skeleton of the text and in my opinion subtly pulls the novel together.

Whether Thelma's experiences engender either sympathy or empathy I can't recommend this novel enough. ( )