The Bear Came over the Mountain

“Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to strange tirades with an absentminded smile.”

Fiona doesn’t come from a traditional family background; instead, she comes from one in which traditional gender roles are flipped. Her mother is written to be more masculine, assertive, interested in politics, and powerful, whereas her father is quiet, submissive, and happy to be there. The mother is the driving personality in the household, even if her husband is well-respected and in charge at work.

“He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.

‘Do you think it would be fun—’ Fiona shouted. ‘Do you think it would be fun if we got married?’

He took her up on it, he shouted yes.”

Having come from an untraditional family herself, Fiona challenges traditional gender roles by proposing to Grant in an informal, unplanned way. For Grant, the thrill of falling in love with a woman so different from those who are familiar to him encourages him to chase her and follow “the spark of life” that she holds (286).

“The new notes were different. Taped onto the kitchen drawers—Cutlery, Dishtowels, Knives. Couldn’t she have just opened the drawers and seen what was inside?”

This is the first clue that Fiona is losing her memory, and when it comes to the onset of Alzheimer's, memory loss that makes daily life challenging is one of the first signs. Fiona forgetting what’s in the drawers to the point of needing to label them impedes her schedule notes, changing the narrative of what she uses note taking for. This is also the first moment of