Word: ferguson
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...SARAH FERGUSON 195 pages. Pantheon...
...crowded presence of such experts, what keeps this remarkable little confessional from being just one more 3-o'clock-in-the-morning scream? The events themselves are unexceptional, almost classically banal as middle-class pain goes. Sarah Ferguson is a poor little rich English girl, given to pills and a bit too much drink. Her husband has left her, and she simply isn't up to loving her adopted daughter, age three...
What should have been, at best, an act of therapy turns out to be a minor work of art. Sarah Ferguson is as intelligent as she is neurotic: educated by governesses until she was 15, an Oxford product, a quoter of the currently quotable - from William Blake to Hermann Hesse. She is also a religious woman who speaks about her "sins" and, in a chillingly matter-of-fact tone, refers to divorce as "a broken promise...
...neither her literary style - classically chaste in the presence of agony - nor her Christian conscience that gives this book its delicately fierce power. What makes A Guard Within a rarity of its genre is this: in her consuming (but unconsummated) affection for her analyst, Sarah Ferguson expresses a gift for life as intense as her gift for pain...
...Adlerian. He is the name of what she clings to. Sarah understands her problem with merciless clarity: she yearns. "Yearn," she writes. "That is a word of such strength it makes me afraid." The specialty of the mediocre neurotic writer is to frighten a reader with his act. Sarah Ferguson does something far more subtle, far more relentless. She makes a reader enter not so much into her fears as her needs, forcing him to confess his humanity as she confesses hers, in words as spare as a prayer: "I want, and I am difficult...