Thinking inside the box
shower her with br i l l i a nt monologues, making her feel validated and s pec i a l .
Fed by their affirmation, she throws herself into her dioramas: for emily dickinson, she builds a miniature amherst bedroom box; for the painter alice neel, a tiny simulacrum of the asylum where she once recovered from a breakdown; for edie Sedgwick a windowed room in andy Warhol’s Factory.
Sirena’s grander, more potent vision acts as a touchstone for nora, sharpening her feelings about her own work. “i loved it, was lost in it, like one of my children,” she thinks. “Children live on the edge of madness,” someone had once told her. “Their behaviour, apparently unmotivated, shared the same dream logic as crazy people’s.” nora concedes that her motivations, like children’s, “aren’t always clear.” But what is it that motivates the Shahids’ overtures to her? Respect? Love? Or something less laudable? When nora finds out, far too late, she’ll want to kill them. But “don’t worry,” she’ll add, “i won’t. i’m harmless. We Women Upstairs are that, too. But i could.”
Once, discovering herself unexpectedly alone in the studio, she had looked up from her Lilliputian shrines to find that her artist friend had gone home to her husband and son. at that moment, nora felt that she was “alone in a tiny pool of light in a great dark room, as if i were myself the figure in someone else’s diorama, manipulated in my own stage set by a giant i could not see.” in this ingenious, disquieting novel, Messud has assembled an intricate puzzle of self-belief and self-doubt, showing the peril of seeking your own image in someone else’s distorted mirror – or even, sometimes, in your own.