Published in Taking Care, Vintage Contemporaries, 1985. Williams seems to give Jenny an autonomy often lacking from stories where a child becomes a mirror of the parents’ anxieties, but this very consistency – the lies, the secret later life – is deeply unnerving. The contrast isn’t for sentimental effect. Was it always going to turn out like this for Jenny? There is something fated about the situation, that sits uneasily with the image of the young girl, sombre as she is. I found, on returning to ‘The Excursion’ after five years or so, that it’s become more opaque to me, even though I’m still overwhelmed by its innovative structure. It will be the discovery of the most fateful part of her”. Loving, for her, will not be a free choosing of her destiny. A call of another mother to come and play remains unanswered because, in the following paragraph, Jenny is “propelled by sidereal energies. ![]() Child Jenny goes to her parents’ room after a nightmare, there are marigolds on the dresser in the next paragraph, the man she is with “likes flowers, although he dislikes Jenny’s childishness” – the man puts “flowers between her breasts, between her legs”. The structure powerfully enacts the lurch and teeter of memory. We move between seeing her with her loving and patient parents, to her adult life in a shadowy apartment with a strange older man. ![]() She is lost in a place that is not her childhood. She lies a little but it is not considered serious.
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