[Monumental] despair is the true subject of Maybe. For Lillian Hellman has gone swimming in the waters of time and memory and found herself adrift in a vast sea of unreliability—the shore of solid information, of what is known about the circumstances of the past, seems to recede each time she believes she has the true details in sight. No jetty of certain facts upon which to perch ever makes its appearance; and there is no place from which her own experiences, her own sense of what her life has been, can now be comfortably and fairly assessed. What really did happen to her, and to some of the figures who have crossed and recrossed the stage of her life? The truths she struggles to reach are always, ultimately, impalpable and insubstantial; what's more, the "real truth" may not matter at all—it may have no importance whatsoever. It is this possibility, the possibility of meaninglessness, that lends Maybe its primary tonal quality, which is one of utter lostness, of panic. (p. 36)
Love, as we envision it—loving that involves knowing and being known by another—doesn't exist in these pages. Each individual is isolated in his or her own skin, and either drinking hard or taking drugs to kill the pain.
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