Featured Reading Guide
Camilla Gibb
Thelma is six years old. Life at home is unsettling and disturbing; her father’s games are not enjoyable and her mother dotes on Willy, the favoured child. When her parents move to Canada Thelma smuggles her imaginary friends with her in her suitcase. Thelma’s life is mostly lived in her fertile and extraordinarily vivid imagination. And she still asks every adult she meets to adopt her-Mouthing the Words tells Thelma’s story though to adulthood and her return to England – to study law at Oxford – in a novel that is by turns harrowing, terrible and wonderfully funny. Through sexual abuse, anorexia…
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Camilla Gibb was born in London in 1968. She grew up and studied in Canada, before returning to England to do a DPhil in anthropology at Oxford. She lives in Toronto. Mouthing the Words is her first novel.
topAbout the Book
Thelma is six years old. Life at home is unsettling and disturbing; her father’s games are not enjoyable and her mother dotes on Willy, the favoured child. When her parents move to Canada Thelma smuggles her imaginary friends with her in her suitcase. Thelma’s life is mostly lived in her fertile and extraordinarily vivid imagination. And she still asks every adult she meets to adopt her-Mouthing the Words tells Thelma’s story though to adulthood and her return to England – to study law at Oxford – in a novel that is by turns harrowing, terrible and wonderfully funny. Through sexual abuse, anorexia and borderline multiple personality disorder, Thelma retains her spirit, wit and imagination. Reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson and Sylvia Plath Mouthing the Words is a remarkable and inspiring fiction debut.
topCamilla Gibb interview/review
NOW Magazine
- What was the inspiration for the novel?
It started with a paragraph. I love language and I had this paragraph in my head that began: ‘Clench, clench, these strong teeth in this strong mouth. My mouth…’ From that I had a title, Mouthing the Words. I knew that it was about the struggle to articulate something, but I didn’t know what story lay between that title and that paragraph which became the ending of the book. I asked myself whose mouth it was. I’ve always been interested in children’s voices and psychoanalysis and I’d been writing a number of stories from children’s perspectives. What I love about doing this is that everything children come across is new. That leaves so much room for both tragedy and comedy as their innocence clashes with reality. So I started at the beginning of a girl’s life, knowing it was about the struggle to articulate something, and like a child’s life, I just let it unfold. I thought I was writing a short story but it just went on and on. I took Thelma’s voice and let her carry me.
- What is the significance of title?
It’s about the struggle to articulate and be heard. A child doesn’t have the words to name their experience. Without words, Thelma draws on the incredible resources of her vivid imagination and a wacky sense of humour to make sense of things, to make things bearable. But she’ll never really be understood by others until she’s able to use words and be heard.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- What is the significance of Thelma’s imaginary friends? Do they represent aspects of her own personality? How do they help her to survive her childhood?
- Does Suresh’s story about the evil king reflect Thelma’s own story in any way? He tells her that she already knows the moral of the tale. What is it?
- Why does Thelma develop such a horror of becoming a woman and how are her anorexia and self-mutilation a response to the abuse?
- ‘I used to think it was because we were English and that English people didn’t feel a need to resort to … touch’. Is their Englishness a factor in the family’s problems?
- Can the behaviour of Thelma’s mother and her reaction to the claims of sexual abuse be explained? Is she a bad mother? Is her father a victim of his own childhood?
- Why does Thelma decide on a career in the law? Is it just a spur of the moment decision or does it have significance due to her childhood?
Other Books by Camilla Gibb
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Sweetness In The Belly
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Suggested Further Reading
- The Bell Jar ~ Sylvia Plath
- Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit ~ Jeanette Winterson
- The Trick is to Keep Breathing ~ Janice Galloway
- Surfacing ~ Margaret Attwood
- Girl, Interrupted ~ Susanna Kaysan
- Prozac Nation ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel