Grey Areas

Unfamiliar with stories from the Bible, I often come across them in (in-law) family gatherings or from contextual stories in novels. The one in The Need I had heard before. It is often used as an example of motherly love. Two mothers appear before King Solomon, saying that the infant with them is their own child. King Solomon asks that the child be cut in two and each mother take half the child. One mother accepts his judgement, the other mother says to spare the life of the child and give the first mother the child. King Solomon then declared that the child was the second mother’s since only a mother would give up her baby if it meant allowing the child to live. 

Helen Phillips introduces this story in The Need, challenging what it means to be a mother. Molly hears footsteps in her house when she’s alone with her two children, and convinces herself that it’s sleep deprivation. But when she notices a slight movement, she confronts the source of the sound and comes face to face with an intruder who knows her life a little too well. As she figures out how to deal with this intruder, Molly must confront her internal battles, and what it means to be a mother.

What drew me into The Need was the intensity of Molly’s feelings. Phillips does a wonderful job of conveying every bit of Molly’s emotions, from how they affect her mentally to physically. We see her having contradictory feelings, feelings that she can’t fully understand, but rather than telling us, we experience them with her. It is challenging to convey complicated emotions in such a visceral way, but Phillips masters creating a crescendo, allowing us, as readers, to feel the intensity of the moment.

Molly’s inner turmoil is exciting because we need it to be unraveled. We need Molly to muddle through the grey areas of her life. Molly’s turmoil is a reflection of our own need to sort a very grey world into black and white. We’re presented so many ideals in terms of black and white, and as we learn more and more, we need to grapple with the idea that everything has a grey area. What does it mean to be a good mother? What does it mean to be good at your job? What does it mean to be completely devoted to your family? Molly asks herself these questions, trying to prioritize the different parts of her life. The constant struggle, the constant choice adds pace to the novel. There’s always something new to think about. Phillps constantly keeps us on our toes, having us almost guess what Molly would do next, and what the intruder would do next.

Phillips also pays close attention to the details in Molly’s setting, using them as way to cause cognitive dissonance. After Molly finds seemingly disparate items in The Pit, she finds that they all have something slightly off. A coke bottle with a logo that’s slightly different, and most noticeably, a bible in which the divine pronoun is She, rather than He. While she can’t deny the existence of these objects, Molly does wonder whether she’s making a bigger deal out of them than they really are. And if she can’t trust herself at work, if she’s exaggerating her experience at work, then where else is her experience exaggerated? We ask the same questions of Molly, flipping back and forth between trusting her and wondering how much to trust her. Her uncertainty is reflected on to us, the reader.

What made this book enjoyable is the way that the details come together to create a thrilling, fast paced novel. While the situation itself seems unreal, to the point where I was a tired of the absurdity, I couldn’t put the book down. Molly’s dilemma was all too real for me, and I wanted to see how it played out. I asked myself many times what I would do in Molly’s place, whether I would make the same choices. But it’s impossible to know unless I was there with her. For now, all I can do is empathize with Molly, go on this journey with her, and hope that Phillips writes another book as thrilling as this one.