" After I finished this book and before I started writing this reaction, I read through many other reviews in the hopes that I missed something, as the ending left me somewhat cold, confused and angry (like the suggestively named "Mary Veal"--and her mother). As others have said, a book about the nature of truth and the impermanence of memory should leave the reader with some questions about whose reality is the "real" one, but I do feel the author should have left a couple more breadcrumbs to lead me in the "right" direction. I'm not asking for a whole loaf of bread...just a few crumbs. Perhaps if I knew more about the case of Dora I'd be able to understand exactly how we should interpret the parallels--and why one of the epigraphs is from that text. The other epigraph is totally ambiguous--Henry James' "Nobody tells fibs in Boston"--could either mean people ONLY tell WHOPPERS, or that nobody lies at all. I suspect the former--but I don't know the context for that quotation, either, which doesn't help.
I do have a couple theories about the book: the sisters are entirely fictional (split parts of Mary's personality), the aunt is the mother, the therapist participated in the abuse, and the abuser was the friend of her parents. Not sure what to make of Mary's dad. But since VEAL is BABY MEAT kept TRAPPED to keep it TENDER before it can be CONSUMED, I do have to think that Mary is NOT a liar and was in fact abused. Phew! "
— Elizabeth, 12/29/2013