The Girl Who Drank the Moon

The madwoman in the Tower has lost her memories. She cannot remember her name, or anyone’s name, including the name of her lost, beloved child. She knows that once she had a place in the world, that she was “loving and loved” (127), but now that is all gone. Now all she thinks and dreams about and remembers is paper. She draws maps obsessively. When she sees Antain staring up at her, she sees her map in the scars on his face. The madwoman wishes she could make Antain understand what she means when she writes “She is here” (129), but she feels like she has lost her power of rational speech.

The Sisters do not allow the madwoman to have paper. Every day they take away the maps she has drawn. Yet the madwoman always has the paper she needs. She gets it by magic, by “reaching through the gaps of the world, pulling out leaf after leaf” (130). The madwoman keeps folding paper birds, putting a map in each bird and letting them fly out of her Tower window. People who find her birds crumple them up. No one finds her maps or her writing.