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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

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Original poster

Weird gaslight-y thing from visiting male friend...

248 replies

Margerine78 · 22/06/2020 19:30

I already know IANBU and my ‘friend’ behaved badly but this post is more for my sanity…

Has anyone read ‘Flowers in the Attic’ and do you agree there’s a subtle storyline about the brother and sister having an incestual relationship. I mean, the sister is pregnant with her brother’s kid in the prequel so…Sorry for the dark book choice but it came up in conversation somehow and my friend point-blank told me I was wrong as he couldn’t remember it happening.

This friend stayed over (support bubble thing) this weekend, I was so looking forward to it after being on my own all lockdown, but he spent whole weekend telling me I was wrong about literally everything - books (as above), films, TV series, how I washed up, how I cooked, how I mixed drinks, my music taste, even how my oven worked! He's normally a nice guy but he turned into a chauvinistic arrogant, argumentative and gaslighting douche this weekend when I most needed to have nice company.

For some reason the book thing pissed me off the most as instead of admitting he may have missed that subtext as he read it 20 years ago and taking my word for it as someone who reads a lot, he instead spent hours making me feel like I imagined it and I’m losing my mind!

OP posts:

TacosTuesday · 22/06/2020 20:38

Ah the old Art is subjective 😂 BS...maybe he felt an utter tool for missing what is bloody obvious and explicit in the story line (it's not implied-it's literally stated) and was trying to style it out?! Tool. If it had been a friend of mine this exchange would have involved serious piss taking (from me) but sounds like he's taking himself a little too seriously for that!!

BertieDrapper · 22/06/2020 20:40

@GlitterNails
I was just about to post the same thing! And yes you are spot on.

My sweet Audrina was the one of her books I found the most strange!!

Loved the Castel family series though!

Original poster

Margerine78 · 22/06/2020 20:40

@MarieIVanArkleStinks as I hadn't read it for a while I was hazy on details but I did say to my 'friend' that I remembered there was this element of 'history repeating' and that forcing the kids into the attic made the eldest take on the role of 'mum and dad' and then puberty hit and it blurred the lines. Rather than engaging in a conversation about the book and all he misunderstood about it (as I would've) he resorted to telling me I was a pervert and made it all up.

OP posts:

MyShinyWhiteTeeth · 22/06/2020 20:41

My ex used to get like this when I had annoyed him in some way and rather than come across as being unreasonable about whatever he was upset about - he would make up reasons to have a go or hark back to something I did that upset him years ago that was long forgotten or never happened.

skylarkdescending · 22/06/2020 20:42

Just a shot in the dark OP but could the discussion have been triggering for him in some way? Do you know much about his childhood?

FedUpAtHomeTroels · 22/06/2020 20:45

@GlitterNails Your right. I am mixing up the mothers story. I remember it all being quite awful. Not sure why I kept reading, but I devoured all books on the shelf back then.

dawnc27 · 22/06/2020 20:45

they actually were brother and sister, as it turned out malcolm raped the older christophers mother and that produced corrine. they then pretended corrine was malcolms and olivias and she fell in love with chris when he came to live with them after his mother died.
final book in the series bart has inherited foxworth hall and all the family go for barts birthday, cathy and chris went before hand to prepare and after an accident jory ended up in a wheelchair so they all stopped longer. a supposedly dead uncle had turned up and tried to corrupt bart more and it all ended up with bart as a tv preacher, chris died in a car acciedent like his afther and jory married his nurse after his wife left him after an affair with bart....

i did read them all again just a few weeks ago, lockdown has me reading everything on my kindle again!

dawnc27 · 22/06/2020 20:46

sorry about the typos and extra letters there, my keyboard is being a twat today

SapphosRock · 22/06/2020 20:48

The sequel was Petals on the Wind and yes the main character (Cathy?) was pregnant with her brother's baby. She miscarried while doing a dance show. Or was the baby Dr Sheffield's? The savior (paedophile) who took them in? I'm pretty sure it was her brother's.

I would hate for my DD to read those awful books!

Quarantimespringclean · 22/06/2020 20:48

Your friend sounds like a know it all plonker. I was a teenager when the books came out and the incest theme was very clear in that book and the sequels. I’d be distancing myself from him.

But people can very be weird about books they ‘read’. A couple of years ago I was part of a book club. We read one (dire) book which featured a very young mother killing her new born baby. The whole plot of the book revolved around the events that lead to this desperate act and her attempts to live her life afterwards with this murder on her conscience. Our book club discussions made it clear that of the 10 or so of us who read it only 3 realised that she had killed the child. The rest seemed to think that she had left the naked baby on an ice floe to be found and adopted by a kindly passerby. Without the infanticide the rest of the book made very little sense so god knows what people thought they were reading about.

Funnily enough they were quite patronising to those of us who had picked up on the infanticide. There was a definite tone of condescending ‘Well, if that’s how you choose to interpret it’ disbelief in the way they spoke to us. Perhaps it’s a defence mechanism for people who have skimmed a book rather than reading it and then get caught out!

MarieIVanArkleStinks · 22/06/2020 20:51

The books were shit. But the band the Dresden Dolls were actually quite good.

Lairymary · 22/06/2020 20:51

Ah, I bet he is the sort that will tell you that you are wrong about something, then it will come up in conversation again in which he is proven wrong, then he will insist it was him that told you it was incestuous. I had a boyfriend like that. We had an argument about which country Snowdonia was in (shouldn't every 20 something Brit know that ) he said Scotland and then he argued he had said Wales when I proved him wrong (petty). That was a tedious 4 and a half years of my life! I put it down to early onset dementia rather than gas lighting (not that I knew what that was then)!

Horehound · 22/06/2020 20:51

We'll send him a link about it and tell him to fuck off. It sounds like he's never read it

Original poster

Margerine78 · 22/06/2020 20:52

@GlitterNails, my take is that it is implied that the brother and sister (Chris and Cathy) cross a line in the first book, and in the second book, Cathy has miscarried a child which is her brother's. There is the story too of their mother/her uncle but I think that's where the book gets psychological as the punishment the kids face due to their mother's incest ironically causes the history of incest to repeat a generation down.

I doubted myself so I have been reading a tonne of reviews online just to make sure I did remember it right.

OP posts:

RuffleCrow · 22/06/2020 20:52

Sounds like he's shown you who he really is.

GlitterNails · 22/06/2020 20:56

SapphosRock - I don't think Cathy knew if the baby was Paul's or her brothers - and fears it was her brother's and that's why she miscarried.

dawnc27 - ah yeah, had forgotten that twist in the later book.

The original relationship of Corrine and her uncle-brother is why the children were kept in the attic after he is killed in a car accident, and Corrine is left destitute. She takes her children to back to her family home - and tells them her own father can't know of their existence as she'd be disinherited, so they have to hide for a few weeks as he's on his death bed.

But then he doesn't die for ages, and she gets used to her new rich lifestyle without the children to cramp her style so they remain there for years.

PrincessBuggerPants · 22/06/2020 20:57

I wouldn't say he was gas lighting, but he does sounds obsessed with trying to undermine you. That's also pretty nasty. And you have to wonder why?

Original poster

Margerine78 · 22/06/2020 20:57

@skylarkdescending if he just went really weird about this book I'd consider this, but he was doing it with everything all weekend (my music, my cooking, other much less dark TV shows). Also, he had a nice childhood. I didn't get weird trigger vibes, just arrogant ones.

OP posts:

GlitterNails · 22/06/2020 20:59

@Margerine78 - yes you are absolutely right. They do develop a twisted relationship out of their trying to survive, and Chris definitely falls for Cathy, and the frustration boils over to him raping her.

But when they escape Cathy does try and move away from their relationship and try to be normal, while Chris basically 'waits' for her and they end up together for their older years.

Horehound · 22/06/2020 21:02

@RuffleCrow you're wanted back on your "is this the ick" thread

SionnachGlic · 22/06/2020 21:06

I read that series in my teens...the incestuous relationship was the premise if the entire series of books....not subtle or an undercurrent. Your friend is wrong & you are right...

msflibble · 22/06/2020 21:11

Yanbu.
The only thing I know about that book is that the brother and sister end up banging.

SummerDayWinterEvenings · 22/06/2020 21:12

I have a friend let's call her C. I got to know her 15 years through a forum. We had our babies together-except she was 4 months a head of me. Of course she was an expect on EVERYTHING to do with birth. I had a c section due to health problems -oh my god did she make me feel terrible for having a c section. I couldn't breastfeed -that was on me -god she made me feel like total failure. I kept her at a distance. She had her second son by C section and -yes then told me how to have one when I have DC2 and 3 by c section. (Having already had one) One of my DC has a health issue I posted about it on FB -she then lectured me endlessly about it and when I said 1) I'm a medic 2) DC is under a top consultant and we will follow his advice thanks -she then proceeded to lecture me on the fact her DC2 had it as well and I needed to do this and this. Got it makes me rage.I debate defriending her and telling her why. In your case I would send him the link to wiki and say 'You came as a guest last weekend and I was looking forward to your company. Instead you lectured me and told me I was wrong about a variety of issues such as the theme in this book. (See link). You criticised everything I did from the way my oven worked to my thoughts on TV Shows. However, I feel I really need to tell you how much you stressed and upset me -you were an appalling guest and friend. I wish you well but I no longer want to be friends with you at all. I do feel I wanted to outline why and for god sake -please don't do it to anyone else. You've turned into a right dick.

cabingirl · 22/06/2020 21:15

He sounds like he was being a dick the whole weekend but UABU if you couldn't do a simple Google search and produce a decent source and prove him wrong. Even the wikipedia entry describes the rape in the basic plot description.

Does he think The New Yorker is fake news? Opening paragraph of this article summerizes the incest plot - www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/reading-in-the-attic

I'm quite stubburn with that kind of thing - I'd have probably ordered the electronic book from Amazon - found and read out loud several times the pertinent passages.

Sounds like a deeper problem than just one book.

category12 · 22/06/2020 21:15

It's as subtle as a brick.

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