hc question(s) for youuu: as we know, there is an inconsistency in the novels - in one, cassie mentions diana saying that faye's mom is dead and in another, faye's mom is very much alive.
but do you think that faye would be the type of person to say "my mom is dead" (maybe in a you're dead to me way) despite the fact that she's, in fact, very much alive?
(bonus question: what is the relationship between faye and her mom, anyway?)
So, with this inconsistency in mind, it can be turned into something very revealing for Faye, actually. Because yes, I do think she could say, very flatly, that her mother is dead while her mother is technically still alive. But not in a melodramatic, wounded little - girl way. More in the sense that she has already removed her mother from any meaningful position in her life.
Dead doesn't necessarily mean buried; it means irrelevant. It means powerless. It means someone who no longer has access to her, influence over her, or any claim on her. Her mother still exists in the house, behind some closed bedroom door with her nerves and her silence, with her shame over not doing more during the fight with Black John, but she isn't allowed to mother Faye. She doesn't get that distinction. She doesn't guide her, protect her, restrain her, understand her, or even really see her. So, being her, wouldn't waste time explaining the emotional technicalities. She would simply call the woman dead and let everyone else misunderstand the statement if they liked.
Faye doesn't hate her mother. Hatred would imply that her mother still has a vivid and active place inside her thoughts. I think it’s colder than that. She's indifferent. Her mother is a closed door in the house. A nervous shadow. A woman who has receded so far from life, from authority, and from Faye herself, that there is no real place for her in her world.
As for their relationship, I imagine it as distant, blood - bound, and emotionally vacant. Her mother being in her room 95% of the time because of nerves is a tell. I don’t necessarily read it as her mother hating her, but I do think there may be something about Faye that she cannot bear to face. Maybe Faye resembles her father too much. Grant Chamberlain is described as being a cold man, and Faye is very much her father's daughter. She probably has his eyes, his dark beauty, his charm, his temper, his appetite for power. Probably has an affinity for calling on the same elements as he once did. When she walks into the room, her mother sees the man who is no longer there, and left a permanent wound behind. And she would never beg to be separated from that ghost.
She would never ask her mother to look at her and see her instead. She would decide that if her mother could not bear the sight of her, then her mother had forfeited the right to matter.
So yes, I think she would say “ my mother is dead ” while her mother is alive. Not because she is lying, exactly, and not because she is grieving in any obvious way. Because in the only sense that even matters to Faye, the woman is already gone. Alive upstairs, perhaps. Dead everywhere else.
She was probably raised by a full - time governess until she is old enough to handle things on her own and has control over the family fortune and her own trust. So really while this question actually is a curiosity of those that don't know her, she doesn't really think all that heavily into it. She's used to doing things on her own. It's just something that's second - nature to her.
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