Helena Aeberli: The Teller and the Tale

The Tower, by Thea Lenarduzzi. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025, 248pp, £14.99. 

Who among us can resist the power of a good story? The old-fashioned sort, which begins with ‘Once upon a time’ and concludes with ‘The End’ and a moral half-learned. The sort best told tucked into bed on a dark and stormy night, the wind wailing outside the window, in which stands a nightlight to shield against the gloom, the cold, any stray ravens which might come a-knocking.

Not me, and not Thea Lenarduzzi, whose second book The Tower explores the very act of storytelling itself, and the seductive promises of history, fact, and fiction. The Tower begins with a story told by a man to a woman, ‘T’, about Annie, a young woman with tuberculosis who was confined to a tower by her father for three years prior to her death in the early 1900s. The story, like many such folk tales and local fables, exists primarily in oral form, fragments recalled by pub-goers and local historians, occasionally captured on blogposts by visitors to the area, like T’s husband.

T is instantly fascinated by Annie. Could she be what historians term the ‘exceptional normal’, an extraordinary individual whose unique life illustrates by contrast the social structures and processes of everyday life? Between 1851 and 1910, approximately four million people in England and Wales died as a result of tuberculosis. The disease was deadly but romanticised, sexualised, associated in particular with waif-like young women and artistic men. Prior to the development of the BCG vaccine in 1921, treatments were rudimentary and often violent: a decaying trout strapped to the chest, the lung and dung of a fox, ‘Dr Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People’ (a universal panacea heavily marketed around the time of Annie’s life). As fascination turns to obsession, T wonders what life would have been like for Annie. And what could have driven a family to imprison their daughter, not at a luxury Swiss sanatorium but in a converted summerhouse at the bottom of their carefully-landscaped garden?

Lenarduzzi is a masterful storyteller. We learn about the lifestyle of Annie’s family — her father a wealthy chemist who owned a chain of pharmacies and built his gaudy turn-of-the-century estate from scratch in a remote part of northern England, his daughters always dressed in luxurious fur coats. Lenarduzzi conjures a relationship between these wealthy interlopers and the village below, imagining a communal rural voice tutting and humming, passing gossip and judgement. She pens diary entries by Annie, who T pictures sat in her tower surrounded by books and journals, or solitary at her piano, longing for the outside world yet free from the gaze of her domineering father.

Lenarduzzi, whose previous book Dandelions (2022) told the story of her family’s migration between Italy and England, has an eye for the British countryside; damp, cold, and storied. She writes singular lines of chilly beauty — cold hands retract ‘into the sleeves of her puffa jacket like the heads of startled tortoises’, a land once claimed by prehistoric settlers is imagined from above, the ‘shadows of their civilisation, lying like skeletons under an emerald throw’. But the pulsing core of the book is T’s obsession with Annie’s story, her desire to make it stand for something larger than itself, no matter the truth she might find. ‘She had the feeling’, Lenarduzzi records in haunted prose, ‘that some sign might be about to break through the surface that everything she saw was a silkscreen on the cusp of being pierced with a message from somewhere else’. The feeling, she knows, is ‘hope, or delusion’, but she yearns for it nonetheless.

This is Lenarduzzi — or T, or her reader — tumbling down the rabbit hole, straying off the known path and in the dark forest. And as in all forests, shapes blur into shadow, reality quivers at the edges. Symbolism steps in to fill the gaps. Those fur coats become bear skins. A raven crows outside the hotel window. And Annie? Annie is a ‘space of mystery’ who T chases not just in archives but through ruins and graveyards and to the top of the tower itself. Standing amidst the ruins of the family’s former home, she longs to touch what Annie had touched, see as she had seen.

Reading of T’s quest, I found myself thinking of religious relics, the desperation in the believer’s desire to lay hands not just on the divine but on the past, to connect themselves through physical and psychic contact to a person long gone, turned totem. Magical thinking, yes, but also profound empathy. Anyone who works with the archive will have felt that pull from beyond the grave, that sense of being caught up in something bigger than oneself, the grand sweeping story of history. She feels she is ‘no longer in charge, that she had become. apart of something beyond herself, with desires of its own’. This is the dangerous, ecstatic state of the storyteller caught in their own yarn. But there are early warning signs about T’s obsession: Annie’s missing death certificate, locals more preoccupied with the story of Daisy the cow, trapped in the tower sometime in the 1950s, than with any vanished girls.

The Tower begins as an absorbing if somewhat predictable read; a fable of fathers and daughters, sickness and confinement, girlhood and vulnerability. Digressions on Katherine Mansfield, Kafka, Keats, The Magic Mountain, La Traviata, and other famous tales of tuberculosis are weaved throughout. Charcot and his hysterics make a bit-part appearance. This reminds me of Marie Bashkirtseff, I thought to myself; then turned a page and there she was, the wonder-girl diarist peering out from the folds of her sickbed in a portrait made shortly before her death.

By its final pages, though, The Tower has become something else entirely. I hesitate to give away the twist, because when it comes, it falls like an axe on T and her readers alike. ‘We don’t always tell the story we want to tell’, Lenarduzzi reminds us, and this is clearly not the one she set out in search of. All stories are as much about the teller as they are about the tale. In real life, there is no ‘The End’, no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no ’Happily Ever After’. There is only, Lenarduzzi tells us in the title of her final section, ‘a kind of finding’, or a reckoning, not with Annie’s legacy, but with what drew her to her story in the first place. The lifelong influences that led her to the tower: a childhood riddled with life-threatening asthma attacks, her relationship with her own infant daughter, a sexual assault by a stranger on a train.

Yet I am not sure whether this final act really works. It is as if Lenarduzzi has had enough of the story she is telling, but is too afraid to close the book and put it to bed. Perhaps ‘afraid’ is the wrong word; there is immense bravery in The Tower, not least in Lenarduzzi’s reckoning with her long-repressed assault, which takes up much of the final section. But the foundations of the book have crumbled beneath her feet, and both author and reader know it. As the carefully-constructed narratives of the first two thirds dissipate into thin air, we stumble for footing. T becomes ‘I’, the tower becomes a metaphor for the self. ‘I have been thinking about’, Lenarduzzi writes repeatedly; ‘I have been reading’, ‘I have been telling myself stories again’. A conversation with ‘the therapist’ is interspersed over pages, including a bizarre aside about exploitative pay-to-publish schemes. There is power in this reckoning with what Joan Didion famously called the stories ‘we tell ourselves…in order to live’, and it makes for emotive reading, but it felt oddly disjointed, even egotistical, severed not just from the story but the lyricism of earlier sections.

Maybe this is the point. Maybe the problem is with me, the reader. Like T, I was seduced by the story I wanted to hear, the story of the girl in the tower, of all the other girls in their own towers hidden within the dark depths of the archival forest. Ultimately, The Tower left me enthralled yet unsatisfied. But then again, don’t all the best stories leave you feeling that way? Don’t they leave you wanting more?

Helena C. Aeberli is a writer and researcher based between London and Oxford, where she is currently working on a PhD on early modern eating disorders. She writes the Substack twenty-first century demoniac.