"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 9
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
-
Borderline personality disorder
15 min read
Elizabeth's behavior patterns—rapid mood shifts from 'red to blue,' fear of abandonment, intense emotional dysregulation, self-destructive actions like breaking glass, and her mother comparing her to her grandmother—strongly suggest BPD traits. Understanding this condition illuminates the psychological dynamics Gasda is exploring in Elizabeth's character.
-
Dissociation (psychology)
16 min read
The text explicitly describes Elizabeth's experiences as 'entirely disassociated from one another,' her feeling of being 'a pluralistic conglomeration of persons,' and her inability to feel time as a continuum. Understanding dissociation as a psychological phenomenon provides crucial context for her character's fragmented self-experience.
-
Transgenerational trauma
15 min read
The novel's premise centers on children inheriting 'their parents' unlived ambitions,' and Elizabeth's mother explicitly compares her to her grandmother. The transmission of psychological patterns across generations is a central theme, making this concept essential context for understanding the Gazda family dynamics.
Happy New Year to all our readers and subscribers!
We continue this week in serializing our inaugural contest winner’s novel, Seasons Clear, and Awe, by Matthew Gasda. New subscribers can catch up with the previous chapters below:
Submissions are open for our next quarterly contest, whose deadline is January 21st, 2026. Finalists are awarded $500, and the Winner $1,000. We’re excited to announce that, due to subscribers like you, it’s free to submit for the foreseeable future. Spread the word (and throw your hat in the ring!).
As ever, if you support what we’re doing here at PILCROW, please consider offering a paid subscription.
⚬─────────✧─────────⚬
“Seasons Clear, and Awe” chronicles three decades in the life of the Gazda family, whose children inherit not wealth but something more dangerous: their parents’ unlived ambitions and their mother’s gift for psychological dissection. As Stephen and Elizabeth grow from precocious children into neurotic artists in their thirties, Matthew Gasda reveals how post-industrial, late 20th century America created a generation too intelligent for ordinary happiness, too self-aware for decisive action: suspended between the working-class pragmatism of their fathers and the creative and spiritual aspirations of their mothers, capable of everything except building lives.
Matthew Gasda is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of many books, including the recent novel The Sleepers and Writer’s Diary.
⚬─────────✧─────────⚬
Elizabeth held the wine glass by the stem as if she intended to hurl it and wake up the whole German house. And John, her tall blonde boyfriend who had grown up in Connecticut with German parents from Hamburg, who was fit and strong and otherwise intimidating, was mortified.
— Elizabeth, he whispered in slightly accented English.
— Fuck off, she said in German.
John crept up and she was trembling and he grabbed her by the arms so that her wrists and hands were still free. And then she dropped the glass intentionally, so that it shattered at their feet and they both just slid back instinctively.
—Fuck off, she repeated in German.
—You have to help me clean this up, he said in English.
She was thinking about what her brother had said at the Megabus station before he left. —If you don’t really love John, you’re only going to ruin your own ...
This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.