“At 15, Dolores began to visit the love motels on the outskirts of her city. Now, at night inside the convent, when she returns, the different rooms have merged into one.” Blurring the borders past and present, sex and religion, desire and shame, Lauren Aimee Curtis’ debut novel Dolores is a short and potent story of a young woman in trouble.
Though Curtis is Australian, the trouble is of a recognisably Irish nature – a pregnant teenage girl who ends up in a convent. The nuns take her in with the promise of salvation and a new identity that starts with a new name: “When the mother superior says her name, it sounds as though it were travelling down a slide. Do-lor-es.” Details of her new life as a nun-in-training come at the reader, fast and vivid: “The nuns never wash themselves. That’s one of the first things she notices. They have yellow-green gunk in the corners of their eyes, their tongues are brownish-pink, and there are flakes of dead skin on their noses.”
This tragic, well-known story could easily lend itself to misery lit, but Curtis allows her protagonist a wider experience. Although life in the convent is certainly restrictive, it offers the promise of redemption. Dolores may be in trouble, but there is the sense throughout her intense journey that she is an intelligent young woman pragmatically surveying new landscapes as she looks for a way out.
The style of the book does much to enliven its content. Short, clipped sentences help to relate Dolores' experience as a teenager adrift in a world of neglectful adults. Curtis blurs time and place in a way that heightens the surreal (but horribly real) experience of sex that mostly verges on abuse. None of the men that Dolores sleeps with could be done for rape, but that doesn't mean they're not rapists. The surrounding landscape reflects this haziness – the lack of details about her hometown, the trips to Spain to see her cousin, the sequence of events that ends with her inside the convent walls and back out again to give birth.
Dark fairytale
Dolores’ story begins like the Greeks, in medias res, with a scene in the convent that shifts back to a family birthday party where the adults are drinking and preoccupied. Dolores, then 13, wanders into a bedroom where her older cousin and his friends are playing sexually charged games: “Everyone leaves until it’s just Dolores and three strangers lying on the floor behind the red curtain. She lets them stick their fingers inside her, one by one.” The mystery behind Dolores’ behaviour comes through in snippets about her parents and upbringing, but mostly it is left for the reader to figure out.
Though her sentences are pared back and abrupt, Curtis is a lyrical writer who appreciates the power of a startling image. From Sydney, her fiction has been shortlisted for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize, anthologised in Best Summer Stories, and published in Catapult, The Atlas Review, The Lifted Brow, Australian Book Review and Fireflies. In its lack of specificity, her debut has a dark fairytale quality and recalls the finely crafted debut novel Peach by the English author Emma Glass. Another touchstone is Abbie Spallen's play Pumpgirl, whose storyline and characterisation is similar – nuanced writing about a young female victim and the men who use her.
In Curtis’s book, Dolores is a victim who doesn’t think of herself as one. Her story feels real and unique to her character. Even though they ignore her at dances in favour of other girls, she doesn’t resent the men she sleeps with – not even the awful Angelo – but rather likes the fact she has intimate knowledge of them: “Alone, in the motel room with Dolores, something would shift. Their body language would change. Their way of speaking too. There would be a bright, unmistakable moment of vulnerability.”
Vulnerability
Yet the desperateness of her situation is clear too: “For the past week or so, she had made similar prayers. To be hit by a car. To swallow a fish bone. To fall down the stairs. Anything.” The sad, central truth of the book, which we see vividly in a later scene with a priest in a henhouse, is that once you’re in a vulnerable position, it’s easier to be abused again.
Curtis writes intelligently on her themes of sex and religion, and on the conflict between the two. Within the short pages of her novel, there is guilt, desire, duty, loss, but there is also, crucially for a character we have come to care deeply about, a sense that she will find an uneasy peace in her new life: “She no longer thought of leaving. She accepted that her fate – whatever that meant – was to be at the convent. And it felt like a large brick had been taken from her chest. She breathed more easily.”
