Lucia

By Alex Pheby

“Her case is cyclothymia, dating from the age of seven and a half. She is about thirty-three, speaks French fluently… Her character is gay, sweet and ironic, but she has bursts of anger over nothing when she is confined to a straitjacket.”

So wrote James Joyce in 1940, in a letter about his only daughter, Lucia. It is one of the few surviving contemporary portraits of her troubled life. Most other references to her have been lost. An attempt has been made to erase her from the pages of history.

We know she was the daughter of the famous writer. She was the lover of Samuel Beckett. She was a gifted dancer. From her late twenties she was treated for suspected schizophrenia – and repeatedly hospitalised. She spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum.

And, after her death, her voice was silenced. Her letters were burned. Correspondence concerning her disappeared from the Joyce archive. Her story has been shrouded in mystery, the tomb door slammed behind her.

Alex Pheby’s extraordinary new novel takes us inside that darkness. In sharp, cutting shards of narrative, Lucia evokes the things that may have been done to Lucia Joyce. And while it presents these stories in vivid and heart-breaking detail, it also questions what it means to recreate a life. It is not an attempt to speak for Lucia. Rather, it is an act of empathy and contrition that constantly questions what it means to speak for other people.

Lucia is intellectually uncompromising. Lucia is emotionally devastating. Lucia is unlike anything anyone else has ever written.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Galley Beggar Press
• Release date: Jun 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781910296950

Alex Pheby

Alex Pheby was born in Essex and moved to Worcester in his early childhood. He currently lives in London, where he teaches at the University of Greenwich. His first novel, Grace, was published in 2009 by Two Ravens Press. His second novel, Playthings—about the life of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose case was made famous by Freud—was published in 2015 in the UK by Galley Beggar Press. Widely acclaimed in media from the Guardian to the New York Times, and called “the best neuro-novel ever written” in the Literary Review, Playthings was shortlisted for the 2016 £30,000 Wellcome Book Prize.

Reviews for Lucia

[wandering_star_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This novel tells the story of Lucia Joyce, daughter of James, and someone who led an extraordinary and troubled life. She was a dancer, who took on a small role in a Jean Renoir film. She was friends with Samuel Beckett (with whom she may have had a short affair), had a relationship with Alexander Calder (who was teaching her drawing) and was treated by Carl Jung, but was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her late twenties and spent much of the rest of her life in institutions, until she died at the age of 75.There is a controversial theory that Lucia was sexually abused by her brother as a child: Pheby picks this up in this book, as well as including similar mistreatment by her father and many other men she comes into contact with. He tells her story elliptically: many of the chapters are told from the point of view of unnamed men, and you have to watch out for the one sentence or reference which tells you how their lives intersected with Lucia's. But in almost every story there is something about the general cruelty of the world to the powerless, reflected in but much larger than Lucia's own life.The chapters are also interleaved with a short story about an archaeologist discovering an Egyptian tomb, which appears to have been desecrated before it's been sealed. He concludes that this is because the dead woman in the tomb was believed by her family to have been cursed, and so they didn't want her to have the usual protections in the afterlife. This is a reference both to the family's destruction of papers relating to Lucia Joyce, and to Pheby's own efforts in writing this book.So it's all very clever. And I do think in principle it's possible to write a clever book about someone who is treated appallingly without losing a sense of that person as a human being (for example, The Clocks In This House All Tell Different Times which is similarly a 'clever' book about an abused child, which doesn't forget the person at the centre of the story). But I don't think that Lucia does that.That is troubling in a human sense. But after a while it also started to make the book a bit boring. As I started each new chapter I knew that it would be about someone who is treating other people badly, but told through that character's self-justification. I knew that there would be one detail which was really gross, but told in the same bloodless way as the rest of the chapter. And I knew that the whole thing would appeal only to the intellect and not the emotions.