The book "The More You Ignore Me" by Jo Brand, is about a young girl, Alice and her childhood and what it was like for her to grow up with her crazy mother with a mental illness and her pot-smoking father. Alice lives with her mother and her father in a small cottage in Herefordshire, England. Growing up, Alice had to deal with a lot of complex issues and problems that were going on in her life. For the majority of her childhood, Alice had developed a second personality to cover up and try to protect her actual personality. In this book, what the author Jo Brand has written expresses several themes and get across some messages to the readers. A message/ theme that were present in the writing all throughout this book was that dealing and overcoming difficult things such as family issues and mental issues help people grow up and discover who they really are.
Alice deals with people with mental issues during her childhood, a great deal of them are because of her mom, Gina. Gina has the mental disease schizophrenia, which is a mental disorder that involves the relation between emotion, thought and behavior to be broken down. This can, and in Gina's case, did result in faulty perception, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships, inappropriate actions feelings and actions, etc. In the book Gina was described as "an unconventional parent whose child-rearing methods were controlled not so much by her experience and instinct as by her mental state" (Brand, pg. 1) This basically means that Gina can be very unpredictable, in one moment she can be happy and proud of Alice, and the next second she's screaming and throwing any thing she can grab. She had a very crazy temper, and it was hard for Alice to know how to act around her mother, so as not to upset her. This caused Alice to, at a very young age, create another persona that would, as she put it; "charm yet protect her from the unwanted approaches of the country's overbearing people" (Brand, pg.15) And this is absolutely absurd that a five year old child should have to create an alternate personality because they fear that people will pay attention to her. This really shows that the childhood she had, didn't really allow for Alice to be herself. Alice also mentions that these personalities work to aid to her emotional survival in the environment she's living in, which was harsh and crazy. And not only did Alice have to deal with her mother and tip-toeing around her so her mother wouldn't go crazy, but she also had to deal with her insane uncles, Wobbly and Bighead who beat people up, and weren't very bright, and her crazy grandmother, who scared the hell out of most people, especially Keith, Alice's father. Most people around the town of Herefordshire knew about the crazy Wildgoose family, and for Alice to be related to them didn't really help her during her time in school. Most children in her school were hesitant to even go near her, and were scared of her and her family because they'd heard the crazy things that her family had done, including a story about Gina sitting naked on the roof of their cottage, holding a guinea pig and screaming. However, after Gina had ran away, and Keith and Alice had found her, they brought her to the mental hospital, which she was in and out of several times. Gina got medication, and drugs that would keep her calm. But the drugs also caused Gina to loose all of her energy and all the fire in her eyes was gone. She sat around the house, barely talking or eating, Gina just smoked and kept a blank expression on her face.
Alice has to deal with many other issues, some of which many people deal with as they grow up, and others that may not be something that happens to everyone. Alice was on her way to finally go see a Morrissey concert, when her grandmother (who was chaperoning) died on the way there. She was left alone with her dead grandmother with no money, for hours before people came to help. Alice stayed with Nan all night though, until people came to help, and she missed the Morrissey concert, which she had been looking forward to for so long. Another thing that Alice had had the misfortune of going through was realizing and coming to terms with the fact that she probably had her mother's illness as well, and realizing that that's probably why she felt such a strong connection to Morrissey for all those years, she had convinced herself that they were perfect for each other and dreamed up a whole personality for him, just like Gina did when she was obsessed with the weatherman on tv. Alice also had her "first experience of motherhood" (Brand, pg. 135) when she got pregnant with her best friend Mark's baby, and then having a miscarriage, when she was alone, in the dark, in the middle of the woods. She didn't tell anyone about it either, because she didn't really have anyone with whom she felt that she could share her feelings with. And this was a moment in the story when I think that Alice wished that she had a normal mother that she could actually talk to.
For Alice to have to go through all of these life changing and incredibly frighting experiences and feel like she couldn't really talk to someone was hard for her. But I think that this might be a sort of defense mechanism for Alice. Because I think that maybe she feels that if she doesn't talk about what's happened, and if other people don't know about it she doesn't have to think about it or acknowledge it. But I think that throughout the story Alice has learned that sometimes it's easier if you you talk to people and allow yourself to love and be happy. And even with just Mark, throughout the book, Alice talks to him more and more and feels like she can trust him and that she can confide in him. And I think a perfect example to show how Alice has grown, is the fact that she gets married to Mark, because she allows herself to love someone, which will mean that eventually she will have to open up. And by Alice going through all these things, and dealing with all of this during her childhood, she has grown and taken off the cover, or her fake personality, and she is allowing herself to be that happy girl that she had worked so hard on covering up for a big part of her life. She explains that "to her family she appeared secretive, apathetic and surly, even though, underneath, she was happy, loved fairies and kittens and wanted to be a vet when she grew up." (Brand, pg. 2) This is what Alice finally let herself be, she's letting herself be what she has been on the inside for all of these years.
Throughout all of Alice's childhood she was dealing with people judging her and her family, and she was dealing with finding about about an illness she had, dealing with her mentally ill mother, and she was growing up, which is hard in itself. But I believe that by going though all of these things, Alice grew and discovered who she really was, and who she'd always been on the inside but never shown to the rest of the world. I think that for Alice to feel safe to uncover her true personality she had to go through a lot of these things, and learn how to handle and manage them. I also believe that burning up their cottage in the end is symbolism for the whole family moving on, and trying to forget their absurd past.
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