Stanzi Westaway Character Analysis

“Sometimes, […] when I see a tower in the distance, I half expect to see a plane fly into it.”

I have struggled through an entire packet of cream biscuits I didn’t like when I could have had cake. Sacrifice, without any reason or benefit. Ife is too short for cream biscuits. I could be trapped in a collapsing skyscraper tomorrow and it would have all been a tragic waste of calories.

They cannot keep the anger in, the women: they drink too much, they shoplift, they sleep with their doubles partners, they scream at their children, the pay someone to take a knife to their eyes or breast or stomach. The turn the anger inward and develop a depression so deep they cannot get out of bed.

Maybe lightning isn’t the best analogy for love. Maybe love is more like a coin: moving between people all around us, all the time, linking people within families and on the other side of the world, across oceans.

It’d be different if Stanzi was pregnant. Stanzi’s going places. She has a degree. That dingy little office next to the dentist, that’s temporary. She’s only working as a counselor until she saves up enough to do her PhD. She’s going to be a psychoanalyst, the philosophical, Freudian type, unpicking people’s fears from the inside. She has a proper career plan.

From what [Kip] says, it seems like all kinds of stupid things had to be kept secret back then. When he says that his sister didn’t die from the flu, Stanzi just nods. Charlotte gets on her high horse about ridiculous sexist taboos and lies and nothing to be ashamed of. Grandma [Annabel] smiles. You can’t imagine what it was like back then, she says. So much pain, all covered over.

“Sometimes, […] when I see a tower in the distance, I half expect to see a plane fly into it.”

I have struggled through an entire packet of cream biscuits I didn’t like when I could have had cake. Sacrifice, without any reason or benefit. Ife is too short for cream biscuits. I could be trapped in a collapsing skyscraper tomorrow and it would have all been a tragic waste of calories.

They cannot keep the anger in, the women: they drink too much, they shoplift, they sleep with their doubles partners, they scream at their children, the pay someone to take a knife to their eyes or breast or stomach. The turn the anger inward and develop a depression so deep they cannot get out of bed.

Maybe lightning isn’t the best analogy for love. Maybe love is more like a coin: moving between people all around us, all the time, linking people within families and on the other side of the world, across oceans.

It’d be different if Stanzi was pregnant. Stanzi’s going places. She has a degree. That dingy little office next to the dentist, that’s temporary. She’s only working as a counselor until she saves up enough to do her PhD. She’s going to be a psychoanalyst, the philosophical, Freudian type, unpicking people’s fears from the inside. She has a proper career plan.

From what [Kip] says, it seems like all kinds of stupid things had to be kept secret back then. When he says that his sister didn’t die from the flu, Stanzi just nods. Charlotte gets on her high horse about ridiculous sexist taboos and lies and nothing to be ashamed of. Grandma [Annabel] smiles. You can’t imagine what it was like back then, she says. So much pain, all covered over.