51 pages • 1 hour read
Beautiful Ugly
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Themes
Psychological Effects of Isolation
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use and emotional abuse.
Beautiful Ugly uses Grady Green’s life as a reclusive writer to explore the psychological effects of isolation. As an author, Grady prioritizes his work over all else. He spends most of his time “on [his] own,” insisting “that [he] prefer[s] solitude” because he “need[s] quiet to write” (3). Over time, however, Grady’s self-isolating habits begin to disrupt his relationships and distort his grasp of reality. He has “[his] characters for company” and comes to “prefer them to real people” because they “don’t lie” (3). He pushes everyone away and becomes absorbed in the fictional worlds he creates. Grady hides himself away from the world, using his writing career as an excuse to avoid developing relationships and investing in his marriage. At their peak, his distance from reality and removal from his wife cause him to attempt to kill her—a crime he swears he doesn’t remember. Through Grady’s complex psychological experience, the novel suggests that isolation estranges the individual from real forms of connection and distorts behavior in dangerous ways.
Grady’s self-imposed detachment increases after Abby’s disappearance and worsens further when he reaches the Isle of Amberly. The isolated island setting, a classic trope of the psychological thriller genre, intensifies Grady’s isolation, creating claustrophobia and paranoia. He begins to experience a “permanent white noise all around [him]” due to the island’s quiet atmosphere and the cabin’s secluded location on the wooded cliff (102). The longer he stays at the cabin writing, the more “[l]ost inside [him]self” he becomes” (103). He “drink[s] [him]self to oblivion,” consumes “gallons of Cora’s bog myrtle tea,” barely sleeps, and devotes all his time in his fictional world (103). These substances and habits further compromise Grady’s state of mind and heighten his fears. Through these dynamics, the novel captures how the individual’s failure to care for himself might negatively impact his mental health and reinforces the need for human connection.
Because Grady doesn’t see his isolation as a problem, he doesn’t see the need to fix it instead seeing it as part of his artistic process. He believes that “[w]riting a book can mean long periods of isolation” and that writing is integral to his survival (103). He does nothing to change his behavior and connect with others in an authentic way. However, Grady’s refusal to deal with his isolation is nothing new. In her therapy session, Abby discusses her concern about Grady’s isolation and its effects on his mental health. She notes that Grady refuses to take these concerns seriously and eventually admits that he seems incapable of changing. Grady’s time on Amberly supports Abby’s suspicions, and even when given the opportunity to start fresh as a part of the community, Grady refuses to change. The novel uses Grady’s story as a cautionary tale: When the individual willfully accepts his isolation, he is in danger of losing what he loves.
Interplay Between Reality and Fiction
Beautiful Ugly plays with the tension between reality and fiction, exploring the tenuous nature of both through the unspooling of Grady Green’s life. As the story develops, the line between reality and fiction becomes increasingly blurred, in part because Grady’s perspective becomes increasingly compromised. Because he is an author, he has always “live[d] to write and [written] to live” (103). After Abby’s disappearance, however, writing starts to feel “like being beaten to death by [his] own dream” (103). Even before he goes to Amberly, the tension between reality and fiction exists in Grady’s life, a tension that he feels daily.
When Grady goes to the Isle of Amberly, he throws himself into Charles Whittaker’s Book Ten manuscript, trying to rewrite it and make it his own, and becomes lost in another fictional world. His grasp on reality wanes further, and this condition is exacerbated by his heavy drinking and inability to sleep, which “cause hallucinations and paranoia” that Grady increasingly struggles to make sense of (103). He cannot distinguish his creative inventions from the real world around him. As a result, Grady’s first-person narration appears increasingly dubious, raising questions about his reliability as a narrator. The novel narratively and formally captures how Grady’s mind might divorce him from the truth and make him the victim of his own inventions.
Over the course of the novel, Grady’s life begins to reflect the manuscript he is drafting, entrapping Grady in the horror story he has written. Charles’s original manuscript was about a writer living on a remote island—a story which “has taken a lot of hard work, rewriting, and editing to turn […] into the story” Grady wants, but one that ultimately feels accessible to him because of his Amberly setting (144). Because he loses himself in the act of writing, Grady’s external world begins to mimic the world on the page. He can’t pull himself out of his imagined world because he values his narratives more than he values engagement with the present. The novel uses this complex psychological dynamic to prove that “[t]ruth is stranger than fiction and tends to hurt more too” (273). Grady willfully loses himself in his fictional world because he’s hiding from the truth; he doesn’t want to face what he did to Abby and hides inside his writing to escape his guilt and rewrite the truth.
Grady’s guilt manifests as delusions that augment his isolation and preclude him from changing. The stranger his world becomes, the more he’s convinced that his “mind is determined to break [him]” (240). He starts “seeing things” and “hearing things” and can “no longer trust [his] own senses” (240). These experiences are the result of Grady’s criminal actions, dishonesty with himself, and refusal to own what he’s done. He convinces himself that he is grieving his wife and that his grief is distorting his reality when really, Grady’s guilt overwhelms his subconscious and disfigures his world. In the end, his estrangement from reality proves that he is guilty and compels him to face the consequences of what he did to Abby.
The Line Between Love and Obsession
Beautiful Ugly explores the relationship between love and obsession, examining how they intersect and inform one another. The narrative structure, which features Grady’s and Abby’s alternating first-person perspectives, highlights this relationship by capturing how one individual’s version of love might be another individual’s version of entrapment. While Grady and Abby did genuinely love each other when they first met and got married, her chapters, set just before her disappearance, show that Abby is struggling in their marriage. Abby’s sections of the novel reveal that she longs for “a fresh start” because she knows “that tough love isn’t real love” (273). For Abby, loving someone and being loved by someone should be freeing, but with Grady she feels trapped. Worse, he fails to notice Abby’s discontentment because he’s too self-involved and wrapped up in his career. After Grady tries to kill her, Abby moves back to Amberly, a decision that makes her realize “life without him [is] less lonely than life with him” (273). What he sees as love manifests as obsession, suffocating her.
Grady’s chapters, however, reveal a different perspective on his obsessive behavior. He declares that he “love[s] [Abby] so much it hurt[s]” her, as all he wants is for them “to be alone together” (288). In his view, what he feels is love, and everything he does is in the service of that love. However, Grady’s version of love is stifling to Abby, tipping over the line into obsession. He doesn’t value Abby’s work and doesn’t listen to what she feels, wants, and needs—he is possessive, as if she were an object to be acquired and kept. When he fears that she’s cheating on him, he tries to kill her—a decision that shows his inability to love her if she doesn’t behave according to his wishes and expectations. His distorted version of love compels Abby to liberate herself by fleeing their life. With Grady’s example, the novel suggests that love that is focused on possession is obsession, which is dangerous and can lead to violence.
In contrast, Abby’s version of love is tolerant, patient, and empathetic. Sometimes when she remembers the start of her relationship with Grady, she feels nostalgic for their genuine intimacy—identifying their early years as “the most passionate of [her] life” (272). She knows she “ha[s] to leave” him when he won’t listen to her desire to have a child but also wants to do so in a respectful manner (272). Like her therapist, she believes that “love is always worth fighting for” and that Grady deserves to know how she feels. Only when Grady’s love becomes controlling and life-threatening does she withhold the truth and flee London. Through Abby’s character and storyline, the novel shows how love can be forgiving and beautiful, even when it’s messy. This notion is further emphasized in the islanders’ relationships with one another. The women on Amberly love each other so deeply that they devote themselves to one another’s care, even avenging after learning what Grady did to her. Abby and her community illustrate a love that is far different from Grady’s: supportive, caring, and protective.
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