However, he decides not to after she gets angry at him for the marijuana she found in the kitchen. He returns home with the resolve to confront Kathy. After he tells her what he found, she tells him that he needs to leave Kathy because Kathy is incapable of returning the same amount of love to Theo that he gives to her. In a panicked haze, he wanders to the house of his old therapist Ruth who welcomes him inside. Alicia storms out of the session before Theo realizes how unprofessional the question was.Īt home, Theo smokes some marijuana to calm his nerves, but accidentally cuts himself on a broken wine glass. This revelation directly affects his next session with Alicia, as he asks if a part of her hated Gabriel like a part of him hates Kathy. That night, Theo discovers that Kathy is cheating on him. During their next therapy session, Alicia attacks Theo, but he sees that as a sign of improvement as she is actually communicating an emotion. Alicia’s doctor Christian, who Theo knows from his previous job, is not happy that Theo talked to Diomedes about Christian’s patient, but lowers the dosage anyway.

When he did reluctantly agree, Alicia struggled to paint the happiness in his eyes.īack at the Grove, Theo asks for Alicia’s medication to be reduced and Diomedes agrees. She asked him to pose for her, committed to the new painting, but he was hesitant. At home, she worked on a painting of Jesus on the cross before she realized she accidentally painted Gabriel. Alicia wonders if she was the real target, but forces herself to stop writing about it. In another diary entry from Alicia six years prior, she reveals her mother’s apparent suicide when she purposefully slammed their car into a wall with Alicia inside. Theo sees Kathy as the light in his life and feels that he is blessed with a love that very few of his patients ever experience. They started dating and were married within a few months. When Theo meets Kathy at a nearby restaurant, he explains that both of them met while dating other people and cheated on their respective partners with each other. One of Alicia’s doctors, Yuri, tells Theo to return to his wife Kathy and forget about Alicia. He tries to contact her brother-in-law Max and her aunt Lydia, but both refuse to speak to Theo. During their first therapy session, however, Theo is disappointed to see that Alicia is heavily medicated and unable to understand him. Because he was saved from madness by a therapist named Ruth, Theo believes he can save Alicia, as he knows he would have gone crazy like her without Ruth’s help. He then reveals himself as Theo Faber, a psychotherapist who suffered an abusive childhood. Our narrator, however, is still fascinated by her story and decides to apply for a job at the Grove to help her. Thanks to Diomedes, however, Alicia was found insane and put into an asylum called the Grove. The media tried to figure out her motive as she was found guilty of the murder. From then on, she never said anything to anyone, and only painting a single painting of herself naked in her studio with the word Alcestis. When she was found in her house with the gun, she refused to speak to anyone and tried to kill herself. Six years later, a currently unknown narrator says that Alicia killed her husband Gabriel six years prior for reasons unknown. She promises that she will only write normal things. She professes her love for her husband Gabriel, as well as her desire to please him by writing in the diary to figure out her emotions. The novel begins with the first entry from the diary of Alicia Berenson. The following version of this book was used to create this lesson plan.

The house the silent age