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"This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance."

The scary thing is that you stay a child inside that accumulation of life. You take your childhood with you when you enter the grown-up world, and as much as you try to pretend that you are free and light as a feather, you carry the heavy weight of having been a child wherever you go.

This is the story of a grown-up woman, an artist, who dares to go down memory lane and remember the abusive friendships, the feeling of dependence, of helplessness, of hatred and admiration merged into the odd feeling of wanting to belong even if belonging means being in acute pain. It tells the everyday tale of a sensitive child under the spell of a bully. It explores how selectively we can choose to forget in order to be able to live on, and how inconvenient it can be for us to suddenly remember what we chose not to know anymore:

"You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away."

I loved this novel to bits when I first read it, and it scared me out of my comfort zone. It was one of the most intensely revealing reflections on childhood and its impact on grown-up life I have ever encountered, simply because the story is so common, and so universal, and so typical. The idea of confronting a childhood bully with one's memories is terrifying, especially as one can never trust the mind to behave as a grown-up when confronted with deeply hidden childhood fears and wishes. A bullied child won't ever forget the feeling of powerlessness or the humiliation and the wish to change the pattern of perceived failure. But the bully will have her own reality, unconnected to the all-absorbing memories of the hurt child:

"She will have her own version. I am not the centre of her story, because she herself is that. But I could give her something you can never have, except from another person: what you look like from outside. A reflection. This is part of herself I could give back to her."

My guess is that most bullies are too one-dimensional to accept a reflection of themselves that might not be favorable, and that it remains the role of the weaker and more sensitive (more intelligent!) human being to understand the mechanisms behind evil group behaviour: "Whoever cares the most will lose". But that is only part of the truth. Looking back with hindsight, a new pattern is formed, and the negative memories become fruitful for personal development.

They are the roots for a rich inner life, and the message I read between the lines in Cat's Eye is that your experience can't be changed or undone, but it can be turned into creative power, and it can feed your understanding of the world. It can help you keep your inner child active beyond childhood, and drive your ambition. You can sculpt a life out of the clay you are given, and turn it into your individual artwork. If you dare to look into the cat's eye of your memories, that is.

You carry your cat's eye marbles with you, shiny, cold, hard, difficult to trade and play with, but beautiful and magical at the same time, a visual and tactile proof of your existence:



Recommended to those who are brave enough to face the true life of children, often too hard to retrospectively bear for grown-ups.