I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“She liked working with patients. Their very illness made them examine sanity as few ‘sane’ people could. Kept from loving, sharing, and simple communication, they often hungered for it with a purity of passion that she saw as beautiful.”

Dr. Fried has an admiration and empathy for her patients that few doctors, especially of her era, possess. She notices their unique views of reality and the world as valuable and sees them as people worth learning from and helping. There is A Fight for a Life that people with mental illness continue to strive for, often against the odds, and this is inspiring to the doctor.

“Sometimes she was able to see ‘reality’ from Yr as if the partition between them were only gauze. On such occasions her name became Januce, because she felt like two-faced Janus—with a face on each world.”

Januce is a symbolic name that Deborah gives herself when she is straddling The Inner World Versus The Outer Reality. This happens often and causes confusion both for herself and those around her. She cannot tell which world she is experiencing or respond properly in these moments.

“She had tried desperately to make intelligibility of white ground and black lines and curves. Nothing. It had taken every bit of strength to remember sufficient English to say, ‘What?’ The teacher had been angry. Was she trying to be a smart aleck? ‘What is the word?’ Nothing. She had been unable to extract a single bit of reality from the lines and spots on the white ground.”

Deborah remembers when she first started to dissociate from reality as a child and the bitter abuses that she took from adults who didn’t understand what she was experiencing or how to deal with it. It was then that she first began experiencing lack of proper function of her senses during moments of stress.

“And then they found that their golden toy was flawed. In the perfumed and carefully tended little girl a tumor was growing.”

Deborah is born the first grandchild and the first blonde in the family. High expectations are put on her by her parents and grandparents, and when it is found that she has a serious mental health condition, this special treatment of her doubles and she feels a pressure so immense that she cannot bear it. 

“That night she had had a dream—a nightmare—about being broken into like a looted room, torn apart, scrubbed clean with scouring powder, and reassembled, dead but now acceptable.”

Deborah’s dreams are often metaphorical, and this dream represents the surgeries Deborah had to remove the tumors, and the overall messages that she received as a young child that she was unacceptable and tainted until she underwent the medical treatment. This lesson becomes inscribed on her very self, and she must overcome it, along with her other issues, to let go of Yr.

“To those who had never dared to think of themselves, except in secret, as eccentric and strange, freedom was freedom to be crazy, bats, nuts, loony, and, more seriously, mad, insane, demented, out of one’s mind. And there was a hierarchy of privilege to enjoy these freedoms.”

Deborah lists off all the unpleasant and uncomfortable adjectives she can think of to describe people who have a mental illness. She does so in an effort to explain the need for freedom of expression, particularly when trying to grapple with shame and stigma. It is also a quote about valuing honesty and the right to describe oneself as one chooses.

“Deborah’s world revolved around an inborn curse and a special, bittersweet belief in God and the Czechs and the Poles; it was full of mysteries and lies and changes. The understanding of the mysteries was tears; the reality behind the lies was death; and the changes were a secret combat in which the Jews, or Deborah, always lost.”

Deborah’s childhood and the antisemitism she experiences, as well as the pressure put on her by her family, are all part of a wider societal issue surrounding persecution of Jewish people. She must live under this shadow and is constantly ridiculed for simply existing, which contributes to the development of her mental health condition.

“The people on the edge of Hell were most afraid of the devil; for those already in hell the devil was only another and no one in particular.”

In this metaphor, Deborah refers to the contrast between people who work with patients who have mental health conditions and the patients themselves. The nurses and attendants observe the patients and fear the part of themselves that they see and their own potential to fall sick themselves. The patients, who have already crossed that bridge, are not unfazed by it.

“Don’t toy with us, Bird-one, because we can do it up, down, and sideways. You thought all those descriptions were metaphors: lost one’s mind, cracked-up, crazed, demented, lunatic? Alas, you see, they are all quite, quite true. Don’t toy with us, Bird-one, because we are protecting you. When you admire the world again, wait for our darkness.”

Deborah often has intrusions from the voices of Yr, who taunt her, mock her, and attempt to control her actions to keep her immersed in the inner world. They refer to her as a bird because of the deception of freedom that Yr represents. Here, they also embody the deeply entrenched societal stigma toward people who have a mental illness.

“The only reality I offer is challenge, and being well is being free to accept it or not at whatever level you are capable. I never promise lies, and the rose-garden world of perfection is a lie…and a bore, too!”

Dr. Fried uses a metaphor to mock the idea of hoping for perfection and constant joy in life. She thinks it is an illusion and a lie, and not something that Deborah should consider aiming for. Instead, Dr. Fried offers Deborah honesty and the opportunity to choose a life should she want it.

“Deborah could think of no special reason for Carla’s courage and generosity. She wondered for a moment if it might not be that Carla was simply glad to see her. Could there be a world, really, beyond her walled eye?”

Deborah’s connection with Carla is an essential component of her recovery because Carla is someone she can relate with, talk to, and who she grows to genuinely care about. When she realizes that Carla feels the same way, it is yet another clue that there is an outer reality worth striving toward.

“The great Doris Rivera had broken her back on the wheel of the world.”

Greenberg’s prose is often laced with poetic elements like alliteration and metaphor. Doris is also a symbol of the fear of A Fight for a Life that exists within all the patients, including Deborah. She represents the knowledge that they may someday attempt to live in the world, and that they may fail at doing so.

“She would not see them except as blurs of white. She would seldom hear them unless they spoke of her or gave specific orders. This protection against their newness and beauty was more successful than fighting.”

Deborah often describes the prejudice that the staff of the facility hold toward her, but sometimes forgets that she too holds prejudice against them. Often before even getting to know them, she dismisses them as just like the others, and there are only one or two staff that Deborah allows herself to connect with.

“She could never get beyond the austerity of his manner or the icy logic of what he had proven, to tell him that his scalpels were intrusions into her mind just as long-ago doctors had intruded into her body, and that furthermore, his proofs were utterly and singularly irrelevant.”

Deborah does not get along with her replacement doctor, finding him to lack empathy and rely far too much on logic and calculation. The humanity of therapy is totally removed in his presence, and she feels almost like he is taking apart her mind with no regard for her as a person.

“For members of the world, sunlight was streaming through the windows, but its goldenness and warmth were only there for her to perceive from a distance. The air around her was still cold and dark. It was this eternal estrangement, not fire against her flesh, that was the agony.”

Deborah is constantly burdened by feelings of having no connection to the world around her, yet is asked by Dr. Fried to trust that there is a world and it is one worth striving to be a part of. Deborah cannot sense things the way others do when she is at her lowest, as though she is not really where her body is.

“For nothing easy or sweet, and I told you that last year and the year before that. For your own challenge, for your own mistakes and the punishment for them, for your own definition of love and of sanity—a good strong self with which to begin to live.”

Deborah cannot be promised a rose garden, but she can look forward to the chance to create some sort of future and be the person that she is capable of becoming: a creative, intelligence, connected individual. This is A Fight for a Life and it serves as the foundation for the novel and her character’s progression.

“Slowly and steadily, Deborah began to see the colors in the world. She saw the form and the colors of the trees and the walkway and the hedge and over the hedge to the winter sky. The sun went down and the tones began to vibrate in the twilight, giving still more dimension to the Preserve. And in a slow, oncoming way, widening from a beginning, it appeared to Deborah that she would not die. It came upon her with a steady, mounting clarity that she was going to be more than undead, that she was going to be alive.”

After coming out of a significant mental health crisis and the eruption of every anger and fear she has ever experienced, Deborah comes back to the world and starts to perceive it clearly again. At the same time, she begins to perceive herself more clearly as a living person who is connected to the outer reality.

“Diamonds, three of them. Three clear and brilliant diamonds, shot with light, lay in the good palm.”

Deborah has a symbolic dream in which she is told she will turn from coal into diamonds. The pressure required to cause this transformation is the pressure she feels both around her and from within herself, and the dream comforts her to know that she is headed in the direction she wants.

“She knew that she had to protect this latest Debby. It was not the sister she had wanted—the prom-going sister, all boyfriends, college football games, and glamour—but in her somewhere, and by some mistaken magic, the family happiness and peace rested.”

Everyone in the family is aware of the power that Deborah’s mental health holds over their own lives, but Suzy is perhaps the most resentful of it. She never got to grow up with the older sister she hoped for, and now she is being asked to always be an afterthought to her as well.

“Where…I…Where I came from we called such people atumai. For such people that extra step is not there to trip them, and the string that they tie packages with is never two inches too short. The traffic lights are always with them. Pain comes when they are lying down and ready for it and the joke when it is fitting to them to laugh.”

Words that Deborah creates in the language of Yri are words that she feels represent whole ideas or multiple, related concepts as one word, in such a way that English often cannot. In English, there is no word for a person whose life always goes well and for whom things never seem to stand in their way, so Deborah creates a word for this feeling she has.

“Was it possible that she could touch things without causing them to become diseased? Was it possible that she could love without poisoning, witness without blighting? Could she give testimony from the elemental bone in a friend’s good need?”

Lists of questions often circle through Deborah’s mind as she encounters doubt alongside a newly forming hope within herself. The way she has conceived of reality is starting to prove itself false and illogical, and the idea that Connection and Communication are dangerous and impossible starts to fade away.

“When I realized that I was alive, really alive and of the same substance as the world’s inhabitants, I told him that I would chew that dry rind and keep chewing until it gave me nourishment.”

For a long time, Deborah has believed that she is of a different substance than most other people, and that she will poison and destroy them if she makes any attempt to become close with them. After years in the facility, she starts to find hope within herself and resolves to pick at it until she has the life that she wants.

“I won it hard! she cried to them. I showed up even when I was sick. I showed up neat and on time and sane every day. I have some certain pride—But they had drowned her out in a great wave of laughter.”

Even until the final moments, Deborah grapples between The Inner World Versus the Outer Reality. The inner dialogue she has with Yr is written as though she is having a conversation with any person; in reality, she is arguing with her own doubts and fears.