Lucia

Alex Pheby

• Publisher: Galley Beggar Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781910296882
• eBook ISBN: 9781910296950
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

"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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• TITLE PAGE
• CONTENTS
• THE FUNERARY PRIEST
• THE DESECRATOR OF THE MORTUARY LITERATURE
• THE BA OF LUCIA JOYCE
• THE IB OF LUCIA JOYCE
• THE BA OF LUCIA JOYCE
• THE SHUYET SHADOW OF LUCIA JOYCE
• THE IB OF LUCIA JOYCE
• NEARBY MEN
• GIORGIO JOYCE
• THE IB OF LUCIA JOYCE
• ARTHUR HUBBELL
• THE SHUYET SHADOW OF LUCIA JOYCE
• LUCIA JOYCE
• THE IB OF LUCIA JOYCE
• THE SHUYET SHADOW OF LUCIA JOYCE
• THE BA OF LUCIA JOYCE
• THE IB OF LUCIA JOYCE
• THE SHUYET SHADOW OF LUCIA JOYCE
• MYRSINE MOSCHOS
• THE IB AND THE BA OF LUCIA JOYCE
• STAFF OF THE INSTITUTE
• THE IB OF LUCIA JOYCE
• THE SHUYET SHADOW OF LUCIA JOYCE
• DR W.G. MACDONALD
• THE BA OF LUCIA JOYCE
• THE REPRESENTATIVE OF THE COMPANY CHARGED WITH EUTHANIZING
• THE BA OF LUCIA JOYCE
• DR W.G. MACDONALD
• STAFF OF THE INSTITUTION
• THE DENTIST CHARGED WITH REMOVING LUCIA JOYCE’S TEETH
• TORIA THURSBY
• STEPHEN JOYCE
• THE BA OF LUCIA JOYCE AND THE MAN CHARGED WITH HER BURIAL
• THE MORTUARY PRIEST
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• COPYRIGHT