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Originally Posted by Catlady
[...] It's the WHY that's most important, whether it's why someone committed a murder or why someone was falsely accused of that murder. I think that's what Atwood explores here, though there are no easy answers.
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I fail to understand why a fictionalised motive is any better or worse, or more or less important, than a fictionalised conclusion. Once any part of the story is fictionalised then - unless the author makes very clear which parts are fiction and fact - the reader is left not knowing where the lines were drawn and may as well be reading a totally fictional story.
As far as I am concerned I've read a work of fiction inspired by what happened to Grace Marks. Interesting for its added realism, maybe (although for me this turned out not to be true), but otherwise little different to reading any other fictional work.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum
[...] In asking those questions, it makes me think of the way people say of a woman in an abusive relationship “Why didn’t she just leave?” And of course it’s never as simple as that. So it is plausible that Grace stayed with McDermott because of fear, rather than because of shared guilt. [...]
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I think this is an interesting perspective, and one I don't think Atwood explored particularly well. Perhaps in a more fictional work the freedom would have existed to express this more clearly.