In ‘The Last Sane Woman,’ people never quite understand each other

A letter is a work of fiction. Even a correspondent devoted to the blunt truth will, inevitably, perform a version of herself calibrated to a similarly constructed audience, assembled from her slant memories and assumptions. These rhetorical circumstances grow even more complicated upon the letter’s receipt: After all, the recipient possesses her own impressions of the writer, which shape her interpretation of the letter’s contents.

The novel begins with Nicola Long, a young ambivalent woman with a degree in sculpture. After graduating, she moved to London, determined to realize her creative ambitions, but a few years later “she had not been able to catch whatever it was she thought she’d seen coming towards her.” She instead supports herself with a wearisome dead-end job, her artistic drive supplanted by torpor and malaise.

The archivist, Marcella Goodwoman, guides Nicola to a set of letters written by a potter over the course of 12 years — from 1976 until 1988, when she purportedly died by suicide — to her friend Susan Baddeley. The potter, readers learn, is a woman named Donna Dreeman, but she never identifies herself in the correspondence, and Marcella cannot remember her name.

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