![]() Her own hypochondria (“I fell prey to patterns of terrible thinking, imagined myself crowded with cysts, with cancer”), along with the dread of the heritable condition that killed her mother, mean deterioration looms as large in Miri’s psyche as it does in Leah’s body. “The way that anyone who sneezes more than four times abruptly loses the sympathy of an audience, so it was with me and Leah.” When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that. A marine biologist, she left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. “It went on too long and too helplessly,” Miri explains. Fathomlessly inventive and original, Julia Armfield's Our Wives Under the Sea is a portrait of marriage as we've never seen it before. To her wife, Leah’s initial symptoms – bleeding gums, strange sensitivities, lack of appetite – characterise a change that feels almost like betrayal. Seeking to answer it herself, Miri spends hours on hold to the shadowy “Centre for Marine Enquiry”, which organised the expedition – though as Leah’s ordeal comes into focus, so do the reasons staff might not have felt equipped to explain it over the phone.ĭeprived of natural light and stimulation, tortured by sounds that test her sanity, Leah’s time in the submarine sets off a chain of events she is powerless to halt. ![]()
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