The Hypnotist's Love Story

“Breakups felt like your skin was being torn from your body. It was actually strange that more people weren’t like Saskia, instead of being so well-behaved and dignified about it.”

The Difficulties of Losing a Relationship forms an important theme in the novel, as shown through the experience of several characters. Ellen believes she can identify with Saskia’s heartbreak because of her own experience with an ex-boyfriend. This image of peeling skin represents the pain an emotional wound can inflict. Ellen’s tendency to downplay Saskia’s stalking—her belief that “It was actually strange that more people weren’t like Saskia”—reflects the fact that Ellen misconstrues stalking as a form of love when it is, in actuality, a form of control that causes real psychological, and sometimes physical, harm to victims.

“That was what was so wonderful about falling in love. Patrick appeared to highly approve of every new thing he learned about her body, her past, her personality. It made Ellen not just sexier but funnier, smarter, nicer, kinder, all round lovelier. She was invincible! Her life seemed to flow and ripple in exquisite harmony, as if she’d achieved enlightenment.”

Ellen’s delighted reflection on falling in love captures Moriarty’s frequent comedic tone, which can extend to hyperbole, as in the case of Ellen’s self-satisfaction. The image of being enhanced by a lover’s appreciation serves to heighten the contrast between Saskia’s despair at becoming invisible to Patrick, the opposite end of romantic love.

“That’s what I hate most about this thing with my ex. She’s in control. She affects my life and I don’t get any say in it and there’s not a thing I can do about it.”

Patrick points to the loss of control as one of the most damaging consequences of being stalked, and a primary source of his character conflict. Patrick’s voicing of his discomfort shows him attempting to explain the toll the stalking takes on him, but Ellen will not realize until the end of the novel that she fails to take his feelings into consideration.

“I just want to know everything about her. I want to watch her, in every imaginable situation. I want to get inside her head and inside her body. I want to be her, just for a day.”

Saskia’s “need” to know about Patrick’s life expands to include Ellen. Saskia’s unhealthy obsession with Patrick and Ellen speaks to the novel’s interest in The Importance of Self-Improvement and Healing, as Saskia initially deals with her pain by refusing to work through her feelings in a healthy manner. The key lesson of her character arc will involve learning to focus on her own life, not Ellen’s.

“On the other hand, wasn’t there something noble about Saskia’s refusal to let go? She was crazy with passion. Ellen had never let passion make her do anything crazy.”

This passage reflects Ellen’s problematic conflation of stalking behavior with being “crazy with passion,” which is a common misconception that can make it harder for stalking victims to have their complaints taken seriously. While Ellen frequently tries to draw parallels between her own feelings and situations and Saskia’s, it is important to keep in mind that stalking is not loving behavior, and that healthy love is not about “do[ing] anything crazy” but about respecting the other person’s wishes and boundaries—which is something Saskia fails to do with Patrick.

“I just felt this sort of crazy fury when I heard her voice. I thought for a while there that I could just accept her in my life, like a disability. But now I seem to be going in the opposite direction. It’s like I’m reaching the end of my tether.”

Patrick here once again expresses the huge emotional toll Saskia’s stalking has upon him. Patrick’s example shows that, conventionally, some people feel more sympathy for female victims of stalkers than male victims. Patrick struggles to get Ellen to understand how upsetting Saskia’s stalking is for him, which is something Ellen will eventually realize towards the end of the novel.

“Patrick was happy with me. He said he was happy. He said, ‘You saved my life.’ He said, ‘I’m keeping you forever.’ He said, ‘I would have been lost without you.’”

Saskia’s dwelling on happy times with Patrick reflects The Difficulties of Losing a Relationship, especially when the end is a breakup other than a death. The repetition of Patrick’s expressions of love have a hypnotic quality to them, suggesting that Saskia is dwelling obsessively on the past instead of moving forward towards a different kind of future.

“I assume that Patrick would have met the hypnotist’s parents by now. The thought of him chatting to the hypnotist’s mother, being polite and trying to impress her, as if my sweet mother never existed, as if my mother was just practice for the real mother-in-law—well, that just fills me with an almighty torrent of rage.”

Part of Saskia’s grief over the end of the relationship is the sense that Patrick is rewriting his life without her in it, cutting her out as if she never existed. This highlights the sense of loneliness and isolation that contribute to Saskia’s internal conflict. The Complexities of Family Dynamics forms another theme of the novel, as many of the family structures are unconventional.

“I’m proud to say that I’ve never given up, I just keep going, no matter how bad the pain is, and people stare, because I guess I’m grimacing. There she goes, a twisted old witch, hobbling after her old pain-free life with outstretched clawed hands, trying to snatch it back.”

This image of Saskia having an imagined dialogue with Ellen, explaining the pain in her leg, mirrors the impact that the pain of losing Patrick has had on Saskia’s life. Her physical pain is a metaphor for the emotional wound that she cannot seem to treat or recover from, while the image of Saskia as a “witch” contrasts with an earlier image Ellen had of herself as a sorceress who can bring Patrick relaxation and relief. Saskia’s circular and obsessive thought patterns and stalking behavior highlight The Importance of Self-Improvement and Healing, as she is failing to seek out healthy coping mechanisms for her physical and emotional pain.

“Yes, as inappropriate as it was, that’s what she felt: a mild sense of pleasure. She liked the fact that someone was that interested in her. It gave everything a definite edge. A spark.”

Ellen’s secret sense of pleasure at thinking Saskia is watching her provides conflict and tension with her developing relationship with Patrick, who thinks Ellen should be sympathetic to the distress he experiences. Ellen’s failure to realize the effect the stalking has on Patrick speaks to her inexperience with stalking and how little she still knows Patrick at this early stage of their relationship.

“What life? Patrick and Ellen are my life. Without them, there’s just a job and grocery shopping and a car that needs a new automatic transmission and that’s about it.”

As Ellen’s life expands with Patrick’s proposal and expecting a new baby, Saskia increasingly recognizes the narrowness of her life by contrast. The opposite trajectory of their character arcs provides a productive tension, which will eventually lead to Saskia recognizes The Importance of Self-Improvement and Healing so that she, too, can have a life she finds fulfilling.

“She felt panicky whenever she experienced even a moment’s irritation with him. They were having a baby together. She had to remain vigilant; any cracks in their relationship had to be patched up immediately. It was absolutely vital. This child, her child, was going to grow up with a mother and a father.”

Ellen’s fears and concerns as she moves into a deepening romantic relationship with Patrick invokes The Complexities of Family Dynamics. The image of cracks showing in her relationship with Patrick echoes the schism of Patrick’s relationship with Saskia, offering what Ellen fears may be difficulties to come. This belief also represents Ellen’s initial beliefs about romantic love, which will mature over the course of the novel.

“‘Do you think he’s still in love with his wife?’ she [Ellen] could ask her [Saskia]. ‘Do you think he ever really got over her? Do you think neither of us really ever had a chance with him?’”

While Saskia feels a sense of both kinship and rivalry with Ellen, Ellen, as she approaches marriage with Patrick, feels a sense of rivalry with Colleen. While Saskia can’t come to grips with the idea that Patrick’s feelings about her could have changed, Ellen fears that Patrick’s feelings for his wife haven’t changed at all and will overshadow all his future relationships. Ellen’s insecurities here will contrast with her later, more mature acceptance of Patrick’s feelings for Colleen.

“Of course she’d grieved for them, but it had been gentle, accepting grief: simple sadness for herself and the loss of their company, not the sort of raw grief you’d feel for someone who died before their time.”

Ellen misses her grandparents and their presence in their life, but she judges her grief as simpler and more straightforward than Patrick’s loss of his young wife. Patrick’s bereavement adds another dimension to The Difficulties of Losing a Relationship, as in his case he lost his wife through her premature death, not via a break up.

“She remembers standing in the kitchen, after that strange awful day in the mountains, breathing in the distinctive fragrances of golden syrup and brown sugar, her heart hammering, reminded so strongly of visits when her grandmother was alive. Her grandmother used to make Anzac biscuits all the time. Saskia’s had been nearly as good as hers, maybe better. Crunchier.”

The sensory images associated with Ellen’s memory of finding the biscuits speaks to the sense of nurturance and support that they inspired when she found them. This connection to her grandmother, who was a loving presence, makes this a positive, almost soothing moment for Ellen, after a day of emotional upheaval. The contradictory feelings Ellen has about Saskia and her involvement in their life are symbolized by this secret that she keeps, even from her closest friends.

“It would also be quite nice to be going home to an empty house, to calming silence and a hallway free of boxes, to a cup of tea with a book, to a long hot bath without anyone asking if she was coming to bed soon.”

The clutter and new noise in her house when Jack and Patrick move in are evidence of the new relationships in Ellen’s life, but her anxiety over the clutter of Patrick’s boxes reflects the moments of doubt Ellen feels about making this commitment and The Complexities of Family Dynamics. In this moment, Ellen sits in her car reflecting on her life, with the changes in her house symbolizing the broader changes Ellen is undergoing.

“You cannot be hypnotized into doing something that goes against your intrinsic values or, in fact, doing anything that you don’t want to do.”

A motif of the book is that hypnotism cannot compel someone to perform an act against their will. Ellen’s belief in this is tested when she gives her clients—and Patrick—suggestions that fall in line with Ellen’s will. This blurring of ethical lines implies that Ellen may not always be as mature and self-aware as she thinks she is, reinforcing The Importance of Self-Improvement and Healing.

“It never really felt like I was doing anything wrong when I went into Patrick’s house, because it never stopped feeling like home. That’s where I spent the happiest years of my life.”

Saskia is a stalker, but she deepens her delusions by claiming that her motives are not to harm Patrick but to simply be visible—to be so present that perhaps he will fall in love with her again. Part of Saskia’s grief over the loss of relationship is connected to the loss of family, especially her status as mother to Jack. What Saskia avoids addressing is that she is causing real harm to Patrick, and that refusing to honor his boundaries and wishes is not loving behavior at all.

“I’ve been trying to unhypnotize you, Saskia.”

The climactic moment of the novel is the confrontation between Ellen and Saskia. The scene of confrontation becomes one of healing when Ellen offers Saskia the tools to let go of her obsession with Patrick and move on with her life, urging Saskia to embrace The Importance of Self-Improvement and Healing instead of continuing with her unhealthy stalking behavior.

“She [Saskia] seemed to Ellen like someone who had lost everything in a natural disaster, someone who was trying to grapple with the fact that the entire framework of her life no longer existed.”

Continuing their connection and emphasizing the parallels between them, Ellen is the one who goes to the hospital with Saskia when she is injured falling down the stairs. Ellen feels even more of a connection at this moment because Patrick told her, under hypnosis, that he doesn’t love her the way he loved Colleen, so Ellen is dealing with her own awful reality.

“And then one morning I woke up and I felt different. Like when you’ve been really sick and you wake up and you realize you’re better. It wasn’t that I felt happy so much, I just felt as if maybe happiness was possible.”

Patrick uses the analogy of sickness to describe his recovery from the robotic emptiness he felt after his wife died. His explanation of his feelings about Colleen is the piece of communication that Ellen needs to really understand his relationship with Colleen—and Saskia—and therefore understand her own relationship with him.

“I said I’d never be happy again. But I am. Sometimes I think, actually, this is better than it ever was with Colleen. It’s deeper, it’s more grown-up. It’s just…better.”

The last section of the book also features Patrick’s healing from the loss of his wife. His description of love is a revelation to Ellen, who was comparing herself to Saskia or Colleen without anticipating that the quality of love could be different. Learning how to better understand love is part of Ellen’s character arc in the novel, while learning to heal from his bereavement is part of Patrick’s.

“I cried for such a long time. There were no wrenching, painful sobs, just quiet, cleansing tears, like a long, soft rainfall on a Sunday afternoon.”

Saskia’s ability to finally grieve her breakup with Patrick is enabled by the card she receives from Maureen and Jack, which acknowledges her role in their lives and her care for them. The image of a gentle, cleansing rainfall reinforces The Importance of Self-Improvement and Healing.