"The Mansion" Response

         Lydia is a troubled mother haunted by memories of a past seemingly-abusive relationship and the possibilities of the life she desires for her son, Ronny. While sleepless and smoking, she describes the tiny, cramped dimensions of her current living space, while imagining an alternate idyllic life in the abandoned mansion next door, but eventually concludes the physical and emotional closeness she shares with her son wouldn’t be worth risking for that kind of lifestyle. 

I thought this story made a daring move in attempting to portray the mindset of a woman looking back on an abusive relationship. Lydia seems ambivalent towards Mike in the present, but when examining memories of their life together and the conflict it produced, she can only wonder “Why do I love this man?”. I thought her inner conflict to reconcile her feelings and his behavior was interesting. I think expanding this narrative to include how she eventually found the strength to move out would tell us more about Lydia as a character. 

The timing of the relationship is a little confusing to me, though. Is she still engaged to Mike? If so, why doesn’t she live with him and his children anymore? If their relationship was completely in the past, I would make sure the verb tenses describing it are uniformly past tense. Also, I want to know more about the narrator outside of her relationship with Mike and her son. She mentions she suffers from insomnia and has “terrible stomach problems.” How did these conditions develop? What was her family situation like growing up, that she feels the need to provide for her son so strongly? Where does this story occur, and what is the speaker’s relationship to this place? These are just a few of the questions I have, which could be answered with much more detail about Lydia. As a reader, I would prefer these questions to be answered in dialogue or description, rather than straight exposition, which is how most of the details we do know about Lydia are shown, like “I am a mother of one son and I am single,” which feels almost too blunt. Lastly, there is the issue of the “you” address, which is present in a few places in the story. There aren’t enough clues in the story for me to know who this “you” is, or why Lydia speaks to them with such frankness, or why this address is powerful.