Ian McEwan: "On Chesil Beach"
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London:Vintage, 2007

p.72:

{Thoughts of 14-year-old Edward [see p.69], on hearing from his father
 that his mother was brain-damaged as a result of a long-ago accident.}

Of course, he had always known. He had been maintained in a state of
innocence by the absence of a term for her condition. He had never even
thought of her as having a condition, and at the same time had always
accepted that she was different. The contradiction was now resolved by
this simple naming, by the power of words to make the unseen
visible. _Brain-damaged._ The term dissolved intimacy, it coolly
measured his mother by a public standard that everyone could
understand. A sudden space began to open out, not only between Edward
and his mother, but also between himself and his immediate
circumstances, and he felt his own being, the buried core of it he had
never attended to before, come to sudden, hard-edged existence, a glowing
pinpoint that he wanted no one else to know about. She was
brain-damaged, and he was not. He was not his mother, nor was he his
family, and one day he would leave, and would return only as a
visitor. He imagined he was a visitor now, keeping his father company
after a long absence overseas, ...


p.79-80:

{Thoughts of Florence, the wife Edward has that day married, and who
dislikes sexual activity. They are moving into the hotel bedrom, Edward
looking forward to sex.}

Entering the bedroom, she had plunged into an uncomfortable, dream-like
condition that encumbered her like an old-fashioned diving suit in deep
water. Her thoughts did not seem her own -- they were piped down to her,
thoughts instead of oxygen.
[NP]
And in this condition she had been aware of a stately, [p.80:] simple
musical phrase, playing and repeating itself, in the shadowy ungraspable
way of auditory memory, following her to the bedside, ...