the other side of you by Salley Vickers

Salley Vickers 2006 novel The Other Side of You explores the many dimensions of love and loss and celebrates the healing power of being heard and understood. After the love of her life dies, Elizabeth Cruikshank, a divorced mother of two, attempts suicide and lands in a mental hospital. She becomes the patient of David McBride, a psychiatrist who is haunted by an older brother who died when David was five years old.

Cruikshank initially sits in silence and will not speak to McBride. Yet in one magical moment brought on by a shared admiration of the artist, Caravaggio, a sense of safety wafts into the room. Elizabeth tells the tragic story of how she found true love, how she doubted the love, and how she lost it. As Elizabeth talks and McBride listens for seven hours, Elizabeth understands more about her relationship with Thomas Gallagher and the ways and reasons she sabotaged her own happiness. Vickers, a psychologist, seems to be lifting up the healing powers of listening and understanding another person without judgment and opprobrium. As David McBride states, “We all long for someone with whom we are able to share our peculiar burdens of being alive.”

In listening to Elizabeth Cruikshank’s heartbreaking tale, David McBride realizes something about his own life. Every choice he has made connects to the guilt he feels over the death of his brother. "I had lived with this invisible gash in my side, this breach in my dyke, this crumbling portion of my sea wall.”

Vickers seems to believe that people carry within them shame and embarrassment for choices they have made or things that they have done and so they hide their most authentic selves from themselves and others. McBride states, “It is hard to account for the common human resistance to happiness, unless it is that we would rather be crippled by what we lack than risk the pain that is one potential consequence of placing our secret selves in others’ hands.” And yet, paradoxically, he also says, “I believe that we are in anguish until someone finally finds us out.”

Though I found the characters distant, I applaud Vickers attempt to write a novel rich with history and ideas. The Other Side of You includes the poetry of TS Elliot, the art of Caravaggio, parables from the Bible, a positive representation of a therapeutic relationship, and the encouraging premise that people can be healed.