Oddbody by Rose Keating Reading Journal

I thought the first story was strange, but this one was something else entirely.

A woman caring for her father as he slowly decomposes into something resembling a giant worm. I honestly didn't know what to make of it at first, and I'm still not entirely sure I do. What interested me most wasn't necessarily his transformation, but the relationship between him and his daughter.

At first, I thought this was going to be a story about the burden of caring for someone. Her father seemed incredibly selfcentered, almost narcissistic in the way he demanded her attention and made her feel guilty for wanting a life of her own. His body was deteriorating, but somehow he still managed to have so much control over hers. And I found that interesting. How someone can be completly dependent on another person and still hold so much power over them. But as I kept reading, I started wondering whether she actually wanted to escape that responsibility.

The scene with Liam was particularly strange. She meets this man, sleeps with him, tells him she wants to take care of people, and somehow ends up bringing him home to meet her father. I couldn't quite understand why she would do that. But maybe that's exactly what makes it interesting. It almost felt like she didn't know how to separate her own life from her father's anymore. Even when she had an opportunity for intimacy, for something that belonged entirely to her, she brought it back into the world of caring for him.

And when she told Liam that she wanted to take care of people, I wondered whether that was something she had always wanted or something she'd convinced herself she wanted because she'd spent so long doing it.

At what point does something you feel obligated to do become something you need in order to feel like yourself?

I also found her loneliness really sad.

The fact that she would go on Quora just to talk to strangers stayed with me. She spends so much of her time looking after another person, and yet she seems incredibly alone. I think there's something quite heartbreaking about being needed constantly but not necessarily feeling loved or understood.

And then there's her father. I kept wondering how much of his behavior was a consequence of his condition and how much was simply who he had always been. His physical helplessness made me feel sorry for him at times, but the way he treated his daughter made that sympathy difficult. I don't think being vulnerable automatically makes someone innocent of the harm they cause.

The ending, though, completley lost me.

I couldn't tell whether she died,suffocated herself, or was somehow beginning to transform into a worm too. And the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether her transformation was supposed to represent something beyond the physical. Maybe she was becoming like her father. Maybe she'd spent so long caring for someone who was slowly faling apart that she had started faling apart herself.

Or maybe there was something almost comforting about the idea of becoming helpless too. Of no longer having to be the person responsible for keeping someone else alive.

I am not entirely convinced by any one interpretation, but I keep coming back to the idea that she was losing herself in the act of caring for him.

What I expected to be a story about someone desperate to escape the burden of looking after a parent became something much more complicated. Because by the end, I wasn't sure whether she wanted to be free of him at all. And I think that's what unsettled me most.

There's also an interesting connection to the first story. Both women seem to have relationships with something that's consuming their lives, and both seem strangely attached to it. One has a ghost she doesn't want to leave. The other has a father she might not know how to live without.

I wonder how much of ourselves we can give to something before we stop knowing who we are without it.