I liked the dialogue between Alex Michaelides and Nadine Vlădescu (Litera Anniversary Days, 2021 edition).
Nadine Vlădescu: That’s very interesting.
So the idea of toxicity and abuse and also the idea of healing, because actually, in the end, everything turns out to be okay or „okay”-ish.
There is this cathartic feeling, like in the Greek mythology.
Alex Michaelides: I think if you can see your childhood clearly, then you can understand it.
There’s this psychoanalyst who had a great influence on me called Alice Miller, and she said that not only do we need to see our own childhoods clearly, we also need to see our parents’ childhoods clearly, in order to fully understand everything that’s happened to us.
And that’s something I often think about, too: if there is any catharsis, it’s the revelation of truth at the end
This also coincides (I haven’t thought about that before) with a detective story because that’s the truth – if the lies are stopped and there’s actual revelation of what really happened.
There’s a similarity there, I think.
