I'm Sorry You Feel That Way: a compelling domestic comedy about complex family dynamics, mental health and the intricacies of sibling relationships. by Rebecca Wait

Author:Rebecca Wait [Wait, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2022-07-06T21:00:00+00:00

The interviews prove no more challenging than Kemi’s practice sessions, and certainly less startling. And yet somehow here, at the eleventh hour, Hanna finds herself falling apart. Her mother’s voice is in her head: It’s very important you come across as likeable. And so Hanna grows self-conscious, second-guesses everything she says or does, even down to the way she introduces herself, her handshake, how she arranges herself in the various chairs she is directed to. She worries her jeans look too informal after all, even though many of the other candidates are also wearing jeans. She fiddles with her bracelet, stops herself, then fiddles with it again. In her first interview, she misdates the unseen passage by several hundred years, and then finds herself admitting that she skipped all the whaling bits in Moby Dick, never finished Sons and Lovers and doesn’t find Dickens funny. She can’t seem to help herself; it is as though her brain has mistaken the fellow’s office for a confessional and is frantically unburdening itself.

Her second interview goes better, and she and the interviewer have quite a good discussion about Milton, but her third is another disaster. The sofa opposite the interviewer’s chair is so old and indented that when Hanna goes to sit on it, she sinks down into it to an absurd degree, her legs coming up off the ground, as if the sofa is trying to swallow her whole. She spends the first few minutes of the interview trying to respond coherently to the interviewer’s questions whilst simultaneously struggling to free herself from the sofa.

‘Everything all right?’ the interviewer says rather belatedly, just as Hanna has finally managed to hoist herself out and perch in relative safety on the very edge of the sofa cushion.

‘Yes thanks,’ she says, out of breath. She wonders if the sofa was a test. If so, she is sure the other candidates have acquitted themselves with more dignity.

The interviewer turns his questioning to Othello, her A-level text, asking her about the symbolism of the wedding sheets in act four, but Hanna, exhausted by her battle with the sofa, just says idiotically that they haven’t got to that bit in class yet.

‘But it’s probably a great bit of symbolism,’ she adds, feeling the need to fill the silence that follows. ‘I’m sure I’ll enjoy it when I get there.’

Then he asks her why Iago wants to destroy Othello, and Hanna quotes Coleridge on Iago’s ‘motiveless malignity’, and the interviewer says, ‘Yes, but that’s rather an outdated view now,’ and Hanna feels crushed. He ends by asking her if it’s surprising Desdemona defies her father to marry Othello in the first place, and Hanna, having more or less given up by this point, says that people will go to great lengths to annoy their parents. The interviewer looks at her sombrely and says it was nice to meet her.

‘How was it?’ her mother asks when Hanna finally emerges, ashen-faced, from the college in the late afternoon. When Hanna only shakes her head, her mother says bracingly, ‘I’m sure it went better than you thought.

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