Alex Pheby Gill Lowe

Alex was drawn to Lucia’s tragic alex pheby story having discovered her medical records were suppressed and that Stephen Joyce, her nephew, had burned all her correspondence with James Joyce and with Samuel Beckett. Alex was advised not to write Lucia’s story but this proved ‘a red rag to a bull’: a motivator, in effect. The destroyed BY GILL LOWE records constituted, he said, ‘a deliberate act of erasure’, opening up space for In June, biofictional speculation. Alex Historical documentation reveals Pheby that, at the behest of her family, Lucia spoke (1907-1982) was confined in several to an psychiatric institutions. She was injected attentive with barbiturates, seawater and serum audience concocted from bovine foetuses. Her about teeth were removed; she was subjected Lucia to brutal hydrotherapy regimes. She (2018), died, after spending thirty years in St his most Andrews’ Hospital, Northamptonshire. recent Beckett, once her lover, sent birthday book, presents, the last arriving after her death. which Alex maps how Lucia was focuses adversely affected and abused by men: on James Joyce; her brother, Giorgio; the James Joyce estate; her lovers and the medical Joyce’s troubled and troubling daughter. fraternity. Alex realises the problematic Alex said he wanted to ‘piece together’ issues raised by his bold project. He the character whose story had been remarked that we ‘animate and parade ‘erased by men’. Lucia was a gifted the dead like puppets in ways that professional eurhythmic dancer, can’t be ethical’ but, concurrently, this appearing in Jean Renoir’s ‘The Little was ‘gruelling empathetic work’. Lucia Match Girl’ ballet, filmed in 1927, before was like a dark-edged silhouette; Alex she was incarcerated. Mental health aspired to understand why truths about runs through Alex Pheby’s fiction. Grace her had been hidden. Paralleling this (2009) is set in a secure asylum; Alex’s objective he prefaces each section with ‘PhD novel’, Playthings (2015), ‘arguably fragments regarding the archaeological the best neuronovel ever written’ dissection of a woman embalmed in an (Literary Review), concerns the true case Egyptian sarcophagus. of a paranoid schizophrenic. [Alex Pheby appeared on June 10 2019]

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