Agnes Grey and pillow friends

The recent edition in paperback of The Pillow Friend, a novel by Lisa Tuttle published by Spectra Books, has attracted our attention because of the name of the protagonist:

From the critically acclaimed author of The Mysteries comes a haunting, lyrical, and provocative novel of a young woman’s coming-of-age betwixt dream and reality. Here there’s only one thing more dangerous than desire—getting what you want....

As a child, Agnes Grey dreamed of the perfect friend to ease her loneliness: a doll that would talk to her, tell her stories, share her secrets. Only her aunt Marjorie seemed to really understand. Something of an outcast herself, she told Agnes she’d had just such a doll when she was a child. She called it her pillow friend. So when Agnes receives her very own pillow friend—an old-fashioned porcelain doll painted to look like an old-world gentleman—she’s certain her dreams have come true. And so they have—but in ways that Agnes could never have imagined. For as the line between fantasy and reality blurs, Agnes discovers that every dream has its price and every desire must be paid for. Be very careful what you wish for...he’ll surely give it to you.

We wanted to know, obviously, if this Agnes Grey was purely coincidental or not. And in this review (by the writer John Grant/Paul Barnett) we have found some answers (and some...erm... details of the plot):

Tuttle's heroine, growing from childhood to adulthood as the novel progresses, is called Agnes Grey. As a child she is given by Aunt Marjorie the novel Agnes Grey; it is only in later life that she discovers that the novel she has read and reread is not the one by Anne Brontë. Another gift from her aunt is a "pillow friend", a tiny doll whom Agnes discovers can speak to her and advise her. After its demise, she encounters other pillow friends, who are not dolls: there is the phallus-thrusting, mindless pillow friend of her aunt; there are her own bed-partners. The overall theme is that if you are granted a wish -- as Agnes frequently is -- you must live with the consequences, which may be horrific.

After reading about these other ...pillow friends of Agnes, we don't dare to ask what was the real name of the novel that the young Agnes read and reread.

Categories: Books, Agnes_Grey