Breaking Out of Bedlam by Leslie Larson

Crown/Shaye Areheart Books, 2010
Review by Hannah Eason

Cora Sledge, the more-than-unlikely heroine of Leslie Larson’s Breaking Out of Bedlam, is overweight, decommissioned by a wide variety of pills she really shouldn’t have in the first place, and disoriented. This is the condition her grown children discover her in right before deciding to move her out of her home and into an assisted living facility, “The Palisades.”

Among Cora’s primary objections to the place: she is not allowed to smoke at will and her access to pills is now restricted. She has plenty of other complaints about being ousted from her own home and into this strange land of disease and incontinence. Despite herself, she begins writing in the journal her granddaughter, Emma, has given her, recording her frustrations with both her present and her past. She also records her unexpected liaisons – the gossipy women with whom she feels at odds from day one; the male attendee who helps with her breathing treatments (and smuggles in cigarettes for her) who is, appearance to the contrary, “that way”; and Vitus, the mysterious, well-mannered man she finds herself attracted to.

These entanglements, which Cora never anticipated making, inspire some of her forays into the past. She begins tilling down to the heart of her own story, recording things she hasn’t been able to say, hasn’t been able to face before.

As we learn of Cora’s past, we plainly see the dynamics which have contributed to her rather abrasive personality. By the same token, her story reveals the progression of a woman who was determined to never give in despite the pressure, at times overwhelming, which seemed to call for her resignation. We see a woman who faced what so many women silently did growing up when she did: a sense of being cut off from her own personal power, needing to rely on her connections with the men in her life to ensure a positive outcome for herself. She takes measures she isn’t proud of, she commits to a relationship which does not excite her (which makes her feel panicked, even, as she considers how it will determine the whole spread of her life to come), she silences the dreams she’s carried as a girl in the name of ascertaining a future for her children and herself.

The real story of Breaking Out of Bedlam is Cora’s bravery in facing and forgiving herself. She brings a spunky, irreverent spirit to the theme of late-in-life reflection on the past. To me, her voice seemed to make a journey as Cora herself did – in the beginning of this novel, I disliked her voice, finding it aggressive to the point of crude and lacking in warmth. As Cora journals, making the confessions she feels necessary to herself, those aggressive, crude qualities, while not vanishing, become endearing.

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