ABOUT THE BOOK

When five-year-old Thelma immigrates to Canada with her family, she secretly takes along her imaginary friends. Just as Thelma will not leave her friends behind, her family are unable to leave their problems back in England. Abused by her alcoholic father, Thelma retreats into a world of fantasy, where she can change her body shape at will. She entreats any sympathetic adult she meets to adopt her but at the age of 18, she realises that she must adopt something for herself and chooses a career in the law.

Through sexual abuse, anorexia and borderline multiple personality disorder, Thelma retains her spirit, wit and imagination. Reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson and Sylvia Plath, Mouthing the Words is a remarkable and inspiring fiction debut.

‘An insightful and humane exploration of
 the space between reason and imagination.’
The Times

‘A startling debut. If it weren’t for Gibb’s
 smart, punchy prose – a smashing
 combination of the heartbreaking and the
 hilarious – this might have been a sad
 story. But Gibb is too smart and the novel
 is far too compelling to be dismissed as
 another tale of torment. Instead, she
 challenges both the reader and narrator,
 eliciting an examination of the self – the
 good, the bad, the pleasure, the pain, and
 the unrelenting humour that exists in all of us.’
Vogue

‘Cool and quirky, setting all that
 heartbreaking distress alight with
brittle stars of wry humour.’
Elle

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Camilla Gibb was born in London in 1968 and raised in Toronto. She returned to England in the 1990s to pursue a DPhil in social anthropology at Oxford University and lived in Egypt and Ethiopia as part of her studies. She is a prize-winning short story writer, as well as the author of numerous academic and non-fiction articles. Mouthing the Words, her first novel, won the City of Toronto Book Award, an award whose previous winners include Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. After the British publication of her book she was named to the Oranges Futures List – a list of 21 writers selected by the Orange Prize as writers to watch in the new century. Her second book, The Petty Details of So-and-So’s Life is to be published soon. She currently lives in Toronto where she is at work on her third novel, Sweetness in the Belly.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

NOW Magazine

What was the inspiration for the novel?

It started with a paragraph. I love language and I had this paragraph in my head that began: ‘Clench, clench, these strong teeth in this strong mouth. My mouth...’ From that I had a title, Mouthing the Words. I knew that it was about the struggle to articulate something, but I didn’t know what story lay between that title and that paragraph which became the ending of the book. I asked myself whose mouth it was. I’ve always been interested in children’s voices and psychoanalysis and I’d been writing a number of stories from children’s perspectives. What I love about doing this is that everything children come across is new. That leaves so much room for both tragedy and comedy as their innocence clashes with reality. So I started at the beginning of a girl’s life, knowing it was about the struggle to articulate something, and like a child’s life, I just let it unfold. I thought I was writing a short story but it just went on and on. I took Thelma’s voice and let her carry me.

What is the significance of title?

It’s about the struggle to articulate and be heard. A child doesn’t have the words to name their experience. Without words, Thelma draws on the incredible resources of her vivid imagination and a wacky sense of humour to make sense of things, to make things bearable. But she’ll never really be understood by others until she's able to use words and be heard.

STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION

1. What is the significance of Thelma’s imaginary friends? Do they represent aspects of her own personality? How do they help her to survive her childhood?
   
   
2. Does Suresh’s story about the evil king reflect Thelma’s own story in any way? He tells her that she already knows the moral of the tale. What is it?
   
   
3. Why does Thelma develop such a horror of becoming a woman and how are her anorexia and self-mutilation a response to the abuse?
   
   
4. 'I used to think it was because we were English and that English people didn't feel a need to resort to ... touch'. Is their Englishness a factor in the family’s problems?
   
   
5. Can the behaviour of Thelma’s mother and her reaction to the claims of sexual abuse be explained? Is she a bad mother? Is her father a victim of his own childhood?
   
   
6. Why does Thelma decide on a career in the law? Is it just a spur of the moment decision or does it have significance due to her childhood?

OTHER BOOKS BY CAMILLA GIBB

The Petty Details of So-and-So’s Life

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

The Bell Jar ~ Sylvia Plath
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit ~ Jeanette Winterson
The Trick is to Keep Breathing ~ Janice Galloway
Surfacing ~ Margaret Attwood
Girl, Interrupted ~ Susanna Kaysan
Prozac Nation ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

ADDITIONAL ONLINE RESOURCES

Read an extract.

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