Libby Munro's depression

Libby Munro’s depression is a consequential but incompletely explained part of her life with Bunny Munro. The novel presents it through her fear, the couple’s arguments about Tegretol, and Bunny’s uneasy effort to name what is happening, while resisting a definitive diagnosis or a simple account of its cause. Her condition is at once a medical concern, an intimate strain, and something Bunny repeatedly struggles to understand without making it about himself.

Fear and the call

During a telephone conversation, Libby tells Bunny that she is frightened, then broadens that fear: everything scares her. Her words make the distress immediate and sweeping rather than tied to one clearly identified danger. Bunny initially answers by denying that she has anything to fear, a response that does not meet the scale of what she has just told him.

The narration registers the change in her voice before Bunny fully understands it. He imagines its earlier softness replaced by a rasping, discordant violin, an image that makes her altered sound feel difficult to ignore but not yet easy for him to interpret. His moment of recognition arrives as a sudden alarm, followed by questions about whether she has stopped taking Tegretol. The sequence captures a gap between noticing her distress and knowing how to respond: he hears that something has changed, but reaches first for the medication as an explanation.

Libby also tells him that Bunny’s father has called again, shouting and raving, and that she does not know what to say to him. She then raises another source of fear: a man who is attacking women, described as painting his face red and wearing plastic devil’s horns. These concerns give the conversation specific pressures, but her earlier statement that she is afraid of everything remains broader than either one. The novel does not establish that any single circumstance accounts for her condition.

Medication and marital strain

Bunny insists that Libby take her Tegretol and invokes what the doctor said: without it, she becomes depressed, and depression is dangerous for her. His urgency suggests that medication is part of how the couple understands and tries to manage her illness. Yet his words also turn care into reproach. He asks how many times they have to go through this, as if the repeated crisis exhausts him even while he fears its consequences.

The exchange does not provide a clinical explanation of Libby’s illness. Tegretol is named, and Bunny reports the doctor’s warning, but the text does not specify a diagnosis, describe the medication’s full effects, or establish what has caused her to miss doses. That uncertainty matters: Bunny speaks with the force of someone who believes he knows the pattern, while Libby’s broken sobs and fears disclose an experience that his instructions cannot settle.

Their conversation also recalls the beginning of their relationship. Libby’s crying reminds Bunny of their first night together in a shabby hotel in Eastbourne, when she cried in his arms and apologized for being emotional. The memory places her distress within the couple’s shared past, but its significance is filtered through Bunny: he remembers her vulnerability and, in the present, responds to her sobbing with irritation, concern, and a physical gesture directed toward his own pleasure. The contrast makes clear that recognizing her pain does not reliably free him from his self-absorption.

How Bunny describes her condition

In another encounter, Bunny tells a prostitute that his wife suffers from depression. When the woman treats the disclosure casually, he corrects her by insisting that it is a medical condition and that Libby takes medication. His insistence distinguishes Libby’s illness from a passing mood, and echoes his appeals to Tegretol during the phone call. At the same time, the scene places this defense of Libby inside Bunny’s own sexual encounter; he names her medical vulnerability without stepping outside the appetite that governs his behavior.

Later, after trying to clear the flat, Bunny sees the extent of the damage Libby has done to their belongings. His account includes CDs floating in a toilet cistern, pieces of a bootleg video strung around a bedroom light, and a fork driven through his headshot in the bathroom wall. The precise objects make the damage tangible, but Bunny also reads it as a private language of blame. He feels guilty without knowing why, then feels victimized; he reminds himself that Libby had a medical condition and that the doctors said she was depressed, attributing it vaguely to something like misfiring synapses.

That explanation shows both his effort to understand and the limits of his understanding. He recognizes the doctors’ account and uses it to frame the destruction as part of an illness, but he also experiences the ruined possessions as personally directed at him. The novel holds those responses together without making Bunny’s interpretation a complete account of Libby’s motives. Her depression remains visible in the fear she voices, the treatment Bunny says she needs, and the disorder left in the home, while her own perspective is present only in fragments of the scenes shown.