Therapy Session Critique

The opening is powerful and very revealing for the title character, though some of the wording is awkward- like “trusting too much of what people say” seems less appropriate than her caring too much about what other people think. In the middle of discussing her depression, she laughs, an incongruous reaction. How is the reader supposed to feel like this? Is it a manifestation of her “insanity?” Because she doesn’t seem insane, just lonely. Her one-sided confrontation with the therapist is also very telling about her personality. In her speech she refers to a girl as a “bitch” which can be intoned casually or harshly—this can be cleared up with another curse strung before it- which would not be unusual for Caroline. I like the line “I’m just by myself” as it sums up her life and her problem in just four words. She feels physically alone, but does she also feel alone in her problems? Does she recognize other’s problems with socializing? I like the twist as well as the detail of the ball of paper missing the trashcan- I would have liked to see parallelism with Caroline feeling like garbabge.. The husband is not set off by typeface as in the rest of the piece which he easily could be as the use of the world “babe” distinguishes him as a lover. Ending with the words “begins writing” seems pleasantly ironic, but at the same time, the writer has already been writing.