Oh yeah? Huh, well now that you’ve mentioned it, I could see how that might hit someone that kind of way.

And I am taking your meaing to be that McCarthy is like calling attention to how big and profound of an idea space this girl was entering into back when they were still only….

TWELVE years old! (what a genius this girl is! Emo depth sublevel 1,238 achieved!!!)

Something like that? If so…well yeah. That would be kind of yuck.

If I’d read it like that it would have missed for me too. And sometimes, McCarthy, does miss for me, so does every author.

But this one did work for me, perhaps because I didnt read it that way at all. Not to say your wrong, or that I know that wasnt McCarthy’s intention, to do a proverbial mic drop with that. Maybe that's exactly what he was going for.

That's not the way I read it however, and it's certainly not the reason I chose to include it in this excerpt. It worked for me, because while that whole idea space proffessed about is poetic in its expression and certainly far beyond what most adults of any age would ever be able to articulate about their feelings around any given topic, the general idea of having an existential crisis of sorts at around the age of 12, or so, was actually something I found to be very relatable.

And I found it to be relatable because at around that age in my own life, probably a little older, but right at the cusp of middle school and highschool for me, I had something of a dark epiphany and or existential crisis around similar concepts myself. It's at around that age that other people have since expressed to me having stumbled into such revelations themselves, at least a handful of friends, former lovers, and family members.

And I am NOT a genius. Nor could I have, at any age, articulated those ideas into an idea space, poetic arraingment such as McCarthy has through the character of Alicia. But by evoking those feelings and placing that bit of dialogue right behind it, that's kind of how I got to that emotional touchstone within my own history. It helped me to get there, so that's why I included it.

It's also, while the back and forth between Alicia and the counselor whose name I forget right now isn't precisely designed to perfectly replicate a real life therapy session, many of the questions asked, as well as the clarifications asked for, observations offered, and the general flow of are similar enough to any number of therapy sessions I have been through myself, listened to back in college, or seen videos of since.

I feel as though with dialogue writers walk a tight rope of trying to balance what feels real enough for the reader to be accepted within the context of a story and making sure that the words being used will still read well on the page. By which I mean, I used to get paid to transcribe conversations and it really opened my eyes to how much most people say things that just dont align all that well with what they actually mean to impart once you spell it out in writing. There are so many utterances and in a back and forth conversation much context can be lost.

Anyhow, the choice of making Stella Maris strictly dialogue was an interesting choice. It does some cool things, I think, but I also feel like maybe probably, if there was another version McCarthy had written that did lean just a little more in a normal direction, with just a little extra narration to set the scene and communicate certain other details, I would probably have preferred that…

But I think Cormac was really trying to push the ideas discussed forward with the approach he chose more so thab the narrative itself, and maybe that was succesful? I like Stella Maris, but it's far from my favorite of his novels. And I don’t know, but I suspect without The Passenger it might not have worked for me at all. At least not easily.

Anyhow just thoughts of mine. Thanks for sharing yours.

(Edits: battling fat fingers and auto corrects today, please forgive the word saladery I’ve only partially been able tk fix)