the mother who can't hear the question about her son — "I don't follow you. How can…" · S1
I don't follow you. How can someone be too much himself?
Context
Mario asks the truest question anyone in the book asks about Hal — whether a person can be sad while seeming more himself than ever — and Avril, fluent, kind, armed with a whole clinical taxonomy of sadness, simply cannot receive it; she guesses at candidates and offers vocabulary Mario has to beg her to simplify, but the actual thing he's describing slides right past her. The mother who narrates other people's frozen fathers can't parse the frozen son in her own house, and the scene's quiet horror is that the failure isn't coldness — it's that her eloquence has nowhere to put a question shaped like the truth. [sweep · shared-ground depression-anhedonia family-hamlet]