Four Quotes From The Girl With All The Gifts That Chilled Me To the Bone

Not in a horror-fiction way, but in a too-close-to-reality way

Book Title: The Girl with All The Gifts Author: M. R. Carey

Have you ever had a “blind date” with a book? It was popular a while back with book shops, where books would be packaged in brown paper and twine with a simple genre description. The idea would be that shoppers and readers would pick a book up, not knowing exactly what they were getting into, like a blind date.

I did the same with this book.

It turned out to be an eerie but heart-wrenching post-apocalyptic book that made me question the world. Far too many of the scenes were too similar to what happened in the past year since the pandemic started, even for a completely different context.

This book’s genre might have been “horror”, but the quotes that chilled me to the bone were not of gore.

It was about the real, nuanced bits of life.

“She doesn’t know the words for this. “You’re my bread,” she says at last. “When I’m hungry. I don’t mean that I want to eat you, Miss Justineau! I really don’t! I’d rather die than do that. I just mean… you fill me up the way the bread does to the man in the song. You make me feel like I don’t need anything else.”

This book had heartwarming quotes like this one, of a child describing love for the first time. It describes the connection we all miss so much and have been trying to pave over during this time of pandemic restriction.

It creates an attachment between the reader and this child character, Melanie, so if new information, new facts come into play that makes you question the world, it’s a hard pill to swallow.

It’s not unlike people I thought I loved and trusted but the pandemic unlocked their dark, scary and conspiracy theory-ridden side. So scary that perhaps I no longer wanted to feel connected with them but I’d already felt connected to them while at the same time truly despising an entirely different side of them for wreaking such havoc on others’ safety.

It’s that nuance that you feel when reading this story. That people aren’t good or bad even though, oh, don’t we want to be able to just label someone good or bad and be over with it.

Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You’ve already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.

This quote struck me the hardest.

Do you know the quotes where you’ve never had that exact thought cross your mind, but you recognize it like a dear old friend?

This is it, this is that feeling.

I felt this over and over again, and I think, in a way, I felt this too. As far as my memory can reach backwards, I remember running towards a goal, achieving it, and then moving on to the next one.

For me, that looked like graduating high school with top marks to go to a top school. And then I did. And then it was about getting into graduate school. And that certainly came with its own series of pre-set goals that were easy to follow without questioning it too much.

But what’s next? I’ve reached these dreams and my “true” has already moved, preoccupied about what more I could even have.

There are so many more milestones I could be chasing after I graduate. Buying a house? Starting a family? Saving up for retirement? But will these dreams simply move on when I move towards them too?

“It’s like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they’d be born out of the cocoon as something else.”

I’m the other way around — I spent all of my childhood and early adulthood surviving. I lived in such a minimal lifestyle that when I first went to grad school, my room only had an air mattress and a desk. Internet. The basics.

No decorations. I had no money or time for the frivolous.

As I became more financially stable, I started (slowly) adding more things to my place, still hesitant to amass too many things. I bought plants to add life into my home. At this point, I still upcycled quite a lot to make use of things destined to the trash as DIY decor.

I’m also not unknown for Pinterest hopping, wishing that I had picture-perfect rooms as if it were the solution to all my problems — when it’s not.

And this is why this quote stopped and made me think. It’s one thing to build a harmonious relationship with your living environment, particularly during a pandemic where I’m spending all my time in this cocoon.

But I also start to wonder if I’m falling back into buying these ornaments and pictures and any kind of stuff I could find for that dopamine rush of buying something online and another one for when I finally receive that package.

I also wonder if I’m building towards a “true” that will move, again and again, with no destination of happiness. A recurring theme?

Melanie realises now that she’s been told all this already. She just ignored it, ignored the self-evident logic of her world, and believed — out of the many conflicting stories she was given — only the parts she wanted to believe.

I am scared of these realizations. I don’t think I’ve had this kind of realization before, and when I have, it hasn’t been too devastating. The worst rendition of this I’d ever felt was probably leaving food out to cool to room temperature before placing it into the fridge and somehow getting so busy I have the false memory of already having done so. And finding out the next morning I hadn’t. But this is an experience at level 1 and the quote describes an experience at level 100.

I’m scared that when I’m holding too true to what I think are my values, I fail to see the clear evidence that something else is different. This is the year where I really started to question this the most, seeing the number of anti-maskers out there. From my standpoint, this was ridiculous. From their standpoint, they were speaking to the world that just didn’t understand yet, and they were fighting for their rights.

Does anyone else think about this? Does anyone else have this fear? Not only of being wrong but being so blinded or lopsided in thinking that they ignore what needs to be seen?

What scares you the most?

Is it a pandemic? A zombie apocalypse? Or is it one of those deeper realizations that life is more nuanced than “right” or “wrong”, and that most often, we have to grapple with options that aren’t quite either?

Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) doesn’t think she’ll read another horror book in the near future because she’s a total wimp about spooky things but if you do have recommendations that will chill her to the core in yet other ways, please let her know!