 In her article, “The Spectral Queerness of White Supremacy”, Amy K. King points out that “Miranda belong[s] to something that has affected the women in her mother’s family for generations”. The list of things consumed by the Silver girls includes “acorn husks, leaves, and pebbles […] branches from the yard […] and ladybirds”. There is a circular narrative that is achieved by placing value on the items that are consumed from 29 Barton Road and the Silver women. The house needs to consume the Silver women but they need to consume objects that are a part of the house. This need for completion on both the part of the house and of the women is an important theme of the story. The house appears to “consuming and controlling the Silver women” with pica as well as drawing them into a web of hallucinations that are both visual and auditory in nature. Stephanou believes that “the connections of disease and monstrosity to the female body […] draw attention to patriarchal constructions of women’s pathological and inferior status. […] Seeking to contain and discipline female excess within discourse that marked her as other, invalid, sick, and monstrous”. The lines of sanity and insanity are blurred, leaving the reader unable to clearly decide if there is mental illness present within the Silver women or if they are simply being affected by the house.
Miranda, herself, questions her own sanity, wonders if it is “possible that […] her madness […] had been supplanted by someone that she could only be vaguely aware of”. It seems that the Silver women are peripherally aware that 29 Barton Road appears to have awareness and a purpose. Consequently, this apparent “awareness” of the house might also represent the greatest piece of evidence of mental illness in the story. Along with the diagnosed pica, the concept of the Silver home being anthropomorphized could be seen as a sign of some other sort of mental illness that Miranda is suffering from and could explain much of the strange happenings within the text. As the story progresses, and presumably Miranda’s health deteriorates, the text itself becomes more jumbled and the scenarios that are presented seem less planted in reality than earlier in the text. 
If the text is read simply as a narrative about a possible mental illness, “awareness” of the Silver home shifts from a horror element to a “narrative prosthetic” device, as described by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder. They contend that “disability may provide an explanation for the origins of a character’s identity” and yet “this defining corporeal unruliness consistently produces characters who are indentured to their biological programming in the most essentializing manner”. This idea certainly seems to be the case with Miranda Silver. Without the pica, (and possible additional mental illness) the story would not exist as Miranda would have no origin or reason to be. As the story advances, it appears that Miranda is losing time and she is becoming more withdrawn from the world around her. She even resorting to telling her girlfriend Ore, “I’m not alive”. These details feed into the duality of the story, confusing the idea that Miranda could be just be suffering from a mental illness or she could be withdrawing from the world at the behest of 29 Barton Road.  
