" 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just-I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. They were both artists-Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. "Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. Jean-Felix Martin, Alicia’s friend and gallerist, argues that “it’s a painting about silence” read the play the painting is based on, he suggests to Alicia’s therapist Theo, and “then you’ll understand.” Thus even as Alicia turns to Euripides’s Alcestis for a lesson in silence, her own painting is a way of letting people “understand” her, showing them the reasoning-the unbearable betrayal-behind her lack of speech.A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak. Paradoxically, though, while Alicia uses Alcestis as a model for her own self-imposed muteness, she also uses the play as a method of communication.
Her only comment is the Alcestis, in which she depicts herself with mouth silently open, brush in hand. In the novel, Alicia sees a production of the tragic play a few days before her husband Gabriel offers up her life to spare himself in the aftermath of that cruelty, Alicia kills Gabriel and remains completely silent for more than six years following his death. Alcestis is ultimately able to return from the underworld, but when she revives, her anger and hurt are so great that she never speaks again.
In the play, an ancient Greek tragedy, Alcestis’s husband Admetus willingly sacrifices her life to protect his own. Alcestis, Alicia Berenson’s self-portrait based on Euripides’s play of the same name, symbolizes the great pain that can result from betrayal-and the impossibility of putting that pain into words.
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