She had a medical condition

“She had a medical condition” is a recurring, nonspecific explanation Bunny Munro uses when Bunny Junior or others encounter a woman behaving in a way Bunny cannot readily explain. Its first appearance links the phrase to Bunny Junior’s memories of his mother, Libby Munro; its later repetitions turn it into a ready-made response to other women’s distress, without establishing that their circumstances are alike.

An Explanation Passed to Bunny Junior

Bunny Junior recalls finding Libby sniffing his father’s shirts and throwing them around the bedroom, or sitting on the kitchen floor crying with lipstick smeared across her face. He remembers these episodes alongside the assurance that his mother had a condition, which Bunny had told him. The phrase gives the child a label for behavior that otherwise remains difficult to make sense of, while the account supplies no diagnosis or further detail. Bunny Junior’s recollection preserves both the unsettling scenes and the tenderness of his memory of Libby: despite those episodes, she smelled nice and felt soft to him.

Repetition in Bunny’s Explanations

Later, when Mrs Brooks rakes the air with her claws and shouts about Beethoven, Bunny pleads that she had a medical condition. The appeal is immediate and defensive: it offers an explanation for what is happening, but does not clarify what the condition is or what Mrs Brooks is experiencing.

After River runs away sobbing, Bunny Junior asks what was wrong with her. Bunny answers more tentatively that he thinks she has a medical condition. The uncertainty matters: unlike the earlier account of Libby, this is not presented as knowledge grounded in a stated diagnosis. Across the three uses, the wording shifts from something Bunny has told his son about his mother to a general-purpose explanation for other women’s behavior.

Meaning and Limits

The phrase makes illness legible to Bunny Junior as a simple explanation, but its vagueness leaves the women’s experiences largely undescribed. In Bunny’s later exchanges, it also functions as a verbal fallback: he names a possible medical cause without showing that he understands it. The recurrence connects the boy’s memories of his mother with his father’s attempts to interpret women in the present, while preserving an important distinction between Bunny’s certainty about what he once told Bunny Junior and his expressed uncertainty about River.