Moving Through Mental Illness and Grief: A Review of Eleanora in Pieces
While I often like to read for escape or entertainment, I also seek solace in books, hoping to find understanding and solidarity or ways to manage the challenges life throws at me. Eleanora In Pieces by Jessica Maffetore is a book that fits the second category. This novel digs deep into loss, grief, mental illness, and family.
The story centers on Eleanora, who is struggling to cope with life two years after her four-year-old son, Owen, was kidnapped from their home. Ellie feels disconnected from her husband, Daniel, who is the stepfather of her missing child. Her relationship with her parents and sister is strained because she thinks they have all moved on from Owen’s disappearance. Her employer has made adjustments for her to work from home, but she barely manages her minimal assignments. Ellie is trying to take steps forward, but she is consumed by her loss.
Normally, I’m not up for stories where a kid goes missing. It’s too painful of a topic to imagine, and I questioned whether I wanted to read this book. But as I read further, I found that Ellie as a character feels real and honest. Her conversations with her therapist are raw and relatable. I felt compassion for Ellie, which made me want to keep reading.
At the first meeting between Ellie and a new therapist, we are instantly taken into her mental state:
“What do you want out of therapy?” [the therapist] asks.
What does anyone want? A normally functioning brain. A day without hating myself. A mask so I can pretend to be someone else. A way to erase 99% of my thoughts. Are any of those possible?
We follow Ellie through the pages, hearing the circumstances of Owen’s disappearance and learning of Ellie’s anger at the world. Her depression originates from the most horrible thing a mother could endure—the loss and unknown whereabouts of her child—and it permeates the story. Mental illness has for so long been a taboo topic in our society that it is refreshing, in a way, that Eleanora in Pieces delves into this experience so candidly.
While I haven’t known the kind of loss Maffetore writes about, I have coped with depression for my entire adult life. I have heard it said that depression is a failing of the person who is depressed. They should try harder to be happy. Why can’t they just snap out of it? But depression is not a couple days of sad thoughts or feeling bummed about something not going your way. It is the inability to drag yourself out of bed. It is a dark, wet blanket covering your mind. It is an endless prison sentence that offers no escape. Ellie describes it this way:
I spend the next two weeks in bed. I can’t eat. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I get up long enough to make Daniel his coffee, turning my face away from the smell. I wait for his car to pull out of the driveway before I climb back in bed and drop into unconsciousness—the one place I can get away from my own thoughts. . . . I cry until I’m so dehydrated that nothing comes out anymore. I ignore my phone. I don’t turn on the TV or the radio or my laptop. I pull the curtains and don’t turn on the lights. I let the darkness pool around me, filling in all the empty space around my bed until I feel embraced by it. Darkness around me, darkness inside of me.
Ellie is lucky in the sense that as the years pass and she continues to struggle, her employer understands her situation and allows her to work from home, giving her space to cope with her depression in her own way and time. But many with major depression struggle to maintain a stable work life, face discrimination, and often lose jobs. While more people are talking about mental illness openly —it’s become a national concern with the inception of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline—the stigma and barriers linger. In places, the book was hard to read because it mirrored things I so deeply know. And yet, I am grateful that Maffetore wrote this book so that others may understand more clearly what depression is.
Most mothers are pretty good at self-blame and experience some form of mom guilt, but Ellie has it bad. Thinking back to when Owen was a baby, Ellie ponders:
Guilt wasn’t a new feeling for me. I was an expert at it, thanks in part to my mother, who never failed to remind me of my shortcomings. . . . But the guilt of motherhood brought with it new depths of these feelings. A whole, yet-unknown list of things I could fail at.
Ellie constantly questions herself, thinking that if she had just done something differently that night, Owen wouldn’t have been taken. As a reader, my heart broke for Ellie, because I knew that losing her son was not her fault. No one could predict or prepare for their child to be taken. And yet, I also know the vice-like grip of mom guilt. Maybe I should have nursed him longer than 10 months. Maybe I shouldn’t have yelled at him when he asked to play video games again. Maybe I should have stayed home and not returned to work when he was younger. Even seemingly small questions can open up all kinds of internal pain for a mom. And for many, it takes an extraordinary effort to break away from those negative thoughts and trust ourselves.
For a book so focused on difficult things, a light also breaks through the darkness in the moments when Ellie lets herself feel the love of the people in her life. Ellie’s work friend Anton still makes her laugh. He shares about his love life, commiserates over office drama, and even gets her out of the house for a drink every now and then. Ellie’s two tween nieces are a bright spot in her life. She adores the girls, and the time she spends with them shopping, giggling, and playing helps to restore her sense of goodness and beauty in the world. And though Ellie’s mother can be critical and her sister can be patronizing, they constantly care for her.
About halfway through the book, Ellie’s life takes an unexpected and incomprehensible turn, which brings on a whole new array of fears, concerns, and mom guilt. She suddenly has new things to consider, new plans to make. And though her depression keeps her locked up and hurting, it is by regularly seeing her therapist, leaning on her parents and sister, having open family conversations, and letting herself trust again that Ellie finally, slowly, tentatively begins to emerge from her darkness.
I’ve always thought that the mark of a great story is when the author shows you something impossible, something unimaginable, and then shows you a way through it. That’s what Maffetore does here. Losing a child would be a terrible agony, and there is no cure for major depression. And yet, as Ellie discovers, there are ways to move into the light. There is medical help available. There are people who understand. And though it is hard, there are ways to collect the pieces of a shattered heart and stitch them back together again.