The Blue Girl, Candy Lee Caine by Mickey J “Mike” Martin; Fascinating Portrait of a Troubled Marriage
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: If ever there was a book that was made for the cliche that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, The Blue Girl, Candy Lee Caine by Mickey J. "Mike" Martin would be it.
It tells the story of a troubled marriage that gets worse because of the well meaning but thoughtless action of one spouse to another.
Mike Holder met Candice Lee “Candy” Caine Wilson at a college conference in 1969. The staid steady Mike was intrigued by Candy’s vivacious personality, her home life with doting adopted parents, and their mutual desire for a stable home life. The two married one year later.
What starts out as a seemingly happy marriage quickly becomes troubled as Mike climbs the academic ladder for an administrative position. This requires the couple to move around from college to college, town to town, state to state. At first Candy takes the moves in stride being complacent, uncomfortably so. She acquiesces by playing the supportive spouse externally but internally she displays symptoms of Anxiety, Depression, and Bipolar Disorder. Mike is unable to cope with the changes in his wife's emotional and mental state, so he tries to look for a solution or even a cause. His curiosity gets the better of him as he looks into Candy’s background and researches her life before her adoption, despite her repeated urges for him not to. The search for Candy's family history reveals some unpleasant things and inadvertently leads to a violent confrontation that tests the Holders’ marriage.
This is a marriage featuring a couple that loves and cares for each other but still are capable of causing great damage towards one another. Candy's mental health issues cause her to lash out and act unpredictably. She isn't always able to control herself and doesn't get the psychiatric care that she needs. Neither her adopted parents nor her husband encourage her to seek mental health services. Instead they attribute her emotions as just quirky personality traits that are just her being herself.
Mike and Candy's parents don't see the potential danger until it's too late and the danger comes forward. They love her undoubtedly but her parents attributed it to her upbringing (more on that later) and errantly believed that once that was fixed then she would magically recover. They don't account for the long term post traumatic complications that would result or that when she reaches certain milestones in her life like marriage or a career, that she would be unable to handle them.
Mike also inadvertently puts a lot of pressure on her. He commits himself to his academic career and the material gains from it. He assumes that as long as Candy acts supportive and doesn't argue, that she actually is supportive and doesn't have reservations. The constant relocation where she often feels like an outsider isolates her and makes her more dependent on her husband. She feels like if she objects or disagrees, she will seem at best like a nagging shrew or at worst a mentally unstable person. She keeps it all inside and Mike is ill equipped to see beyond that and ask if something is actually wrong or what her actual feelings are about things.
With some exceptions that peer into Candy's family history, the majority of the book is told from Mike’s first person point of view in hindsight. It's clear that he realizes that he made some colossal mistakes and regrets them. This keeps the Reader from seeing him as an abuser or a sadist who delighted in the pain that he caused Candy. He knows that he was a thoughtless heel and admits it.
While their marriage is fraught with unspoken tension, it is when Mike researches Candy’s family history that he crosses the most lines. He is repeatedly told by Candy to drop it and that she doesn't remember or want to talk about it.
He looks up records, newspaper announcements, and talks to distant relatives and family friends without Candy's knowledge or permission (which brings a plot hole that Mike would be unable to find most of that information, particularly official records without Candy herself being present and granting permission but no matter).
Even when he gets the backstory to Candy's ancestry, that still isn't a clue to drop the subject. He is told about three generations of racism, alcoholism, trauma, mental illness, abuse, and neglect before getting to Candy's immediate family and childhood. It should have been enough to connect the dots and realize that chances are Candy's upbringing was not sunshine and roses but no Mike can't let the search die.
Mike feels that he has to be the problem solver, that learning about Candy's family will get to the root of her problems and she will get better. It becomes a mystery that his mind wants to solve but doesn't account for his wife's emotions or that maybe he's better off not knowing. For a time, the problem is more important than whether the solution leads to more unhappiness.
Mike confronts Candy using some of the most toxic language to do so. He does the “If you love me, you would do this” routine. He guilt trips her that marriage should be built in trust and honesty and browbeats her into talking about her childhood. It's a very emotional chapter that makes the Reader turn against the designated hero and question his motives.
Is he willing to jeopardize his marriage and his wife's fragile emotional state to find out the truth? Is he potentially an abuser without realizing it? Are they better off separated instead of trying to work through a marriage that is this bad?
Once Candy talks about her life with her birth parents, the Caines, it becomes apparent why she didn't want to talk about it. She opens up memories of addicted abusive parents, a large unruly mob of loud angry delinquent siblings, and intense poverty and neglect. Candy's past was so traumatic that even though she was adopted by loving parents, the Wilsons, the long term damage was already done.
Again to his credit, when she finishes Mike regrets asking her and is empathetic towards her suffering. He also sees that the confession of Candy's upbringing, tears open old wounds which never healed. What had once been forgotten or rather forced to the back of her mind is now put out in the open. Her mind regresses, so the comfortable middle aged woman disappears. In her place is the troubled young girl who reacts to violence with escalating violence.
Candy's breakdown leads to some actions that change the course of the book which for spoiler’s sake won't be revealed. But it changes her and Mike's status considerably and forces him to objectively look at his wife's upbringing and his own thoughtless actions in contributing to her downfall. He sees a woman who was let down not only by her birth family and society but by the people who loved and were closest to her.
This revelation that Mike unwittingly contributed to Candy's unhappiness makes the ending a bit hard to swallow. It suggests hope and potential support between an older and wiser couple than we met before. However, it is established that they made each other miserable and added to their problems by acting happy when they weren't.
Candy needed psychiatric evaluation and to face accountability but Mike needs help too. He needs to recognize his own controlling and potentially manipulative nature that led to this conflict. It might do him some good to seek counseling himself and spend time apart from Candy.
Perhaps they needed to temporarily separate and work on themselves instead of staying together. Mike and Candy need to work out their issues apart, strengthen their individuality, and then maybe discuss getting back together. That would have made a better more realistic ending for a couple who may love each other but sometimes love just isn't enough.
