This 2014 novel was nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction.
I am grateful for the members’ insights which I share below, as I was navigating family health crises for this discussion.
From Patricia:
In An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine weaves an engaging tale about an unlikely survivor. Despite a dismal childhood, a dreadful arranged marriage, and the misfortune of living in war torn Beirut, Aaliya survives by immersing herself in a world of books – first by reading constantly in the small bookstore she managed and later by translating into Arabic many long and difficult works. Although this elderly Beiruti woman observes: “Most of the books published these days consist of a series of whines followed by an epiphany,” the tale of her life ends with an epiphany of sorts. When a flood threatens to destroy a mountain of boxes containing her many translations, she discovers that she can survive this catastrophe only with the help of several elderly women in her apartment building. Because of the unlikely and untested bond between these women and Aaliya, some of her translations may survive, and she begins to believe she is not an unseen or unnecessary woman.
From Liz:
I enjoyed the story and the characters. I also liked learning about the Lebanese civil war. I found the book sad but hopeful at the end. I disliked the massive number of literary quotes in the book – they became overwhelming for me and took away from the enjoyment of the story.
From Diane:
I recommended this book and really enjoyed it. The author is Lebanese and I learned about the Civil War which deeply affected the protagonist, Aaliya’s life. I found the writing full of wit and also sadness. Many of the references to books and music were not that interesting to me however and I found myself skipping lots of pages. Aaliya is an introvert who isolates herself and prefers the company of books and music, instead of people in her life.
We appreciated Diane’s suggestion of this nuanced, complex novel.
It has been a very plot-driven end to the year 2025 at every level, local, national, international. Like the protagonist of Charlotte Wood’s 2023 novel, we have all been buffeted by the cruelty of what Wood calls, “the broken world,” even as we have cheered on individuals and communities who insist on resistance and hope.
In the midst of the chaos, my husband and I both had medical emergencies (we are mending and home now), and I was grateful for our group, both because the picked up the pieces and kept things going (including taking the leads for two books in discussions and the blogs I am finally posting, and for the continuity and community of our shared reading and conversation experience, more needed than ever.
Health issues are present at any age, but certainly shape the reality of aging for most of us, and to be supported with medical care, and a strong community is a gift I wish for all of us in this, and every, stage of life. I am delighted to share group member’s smart comments on the final books of our last season.
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Crushed by the seeming hopelessness of the broken world, the narrator of this novel, who works in species conservation, despairs at the ways we are destroying the planet, one another, and ourselves.
She leaves her life in Sydney, including her marriage, iand checks into the retreat house of an enclosed convent on the Monaro Plains in New South Wales.
As the Guardian reviewer notes, “retreat she certainly does. For a while she just lies on the floor.”
Eventually, she participates in the life of the convent – joining the other women doing daily tasks of preparing food, cleaning, turning up to mass and the hours of office. There’sno epiphany, no conversion narrative, just a quiet story of people tending to things.
Liz L. writes:
I enjoyed this book. It felt very meditative and stream of consciousness but had enough character development and emotional content to keep me interested and reading.
I was fascinated that the narrator was unnamed. I didn’t even realize it until I was thinking about the book for group discussion! I loved the relationships that the narrator had with the other women in the retreat center and with Sister Helen Parry and with her mother. I loved the stream of thoughts and remembrances and ideas that seemed to flow from the narrator in a constant river. It felt very real and real life – like something I do at times when I remember the past.
From Patricia:
In an interview for the Booker Prize, Charlotte Wood, the author of Stone Yard Devotional,said,
“I wanted to master what Saul Bellow called ‘stillness in the midst of chaos.’
I think Wood accomplished this masterfully. The major voice in this novel is an unnamed woman. We learn that she has left job as a manager in an environmental non-profit. The narrator very briefly also mentions a husband she is leaving, but the novel is not larded with the details of her adult life before she visits the abbey on the Monaro plains in New South Wales. After a few short visits to the abbey, she returns and simply stays. We follow her as she shares the life of this community
of cloistered sisters. The silence and simplicity of her life in the abbey allow her to examine memories of her childhood. As she, with the other sisters, confronts a plague of mice and the tensions surrounding the burial of Sister Jenny, a nun who left the abbey for missionary work in Thailand, the narrator slowly finds a measure of peace with herself.
Annette writes:
Like others in our group, I read this novel in several sessions because there was no plot to carry me forward. Shortly before our Zoom meeting I realized I had had about ¼ in of pages left to read, right where the unnamed narrator and Helen Parry, the activist nun, drive around together stopping for a moment at various places where significant things happened in their youth.
My inability to sense where the novel was going relates to something the author said, as reported in LitHub. “There’s a lot of teaching and admonishing and explaining that goes on in contemporary fiction and I was sick of it… I have this setting of silence and stasis which is not good for a novel… I’m kind of writing a still life painting.” Her friend Jude Rae, a painter of still-lifes, gave her advice for achieving an appealing movement.
Toward the end it seems that the narrator and Helen express their feelings about their mothers. The narrator has become more aware and respectful of her mother’s activities to better the world and also sees them a failure. Both the narrator and her mother tried to do good (through environmentalism and helping refugees, among other things) but they tended at times to distance themselves from addressing local troubles. The narrator’s mother had never visited Helen’s mother. The narrator had joined in cruelty to Helen at school, and in adulthood chose to imagine that the man by the side of the road who disappeared down a covered drain was a worker and everything was ok.
In interviews, Charlotte Wood talks about bush fires, COVID, the mouse plague and floods—all evidence of imbalance. As a middle-class white woman who wants a moral way to proceed in the world, perhaps she lays out some considerations in this novel.
Local vs worldwide activism; kindness vs effective disruption (privileged generosity vs dangerous activity); responsibility vs despair; direct activism vs talking/convincing others; and exploration of retreating into silence and routine to confront oneself, to do the least harm, or to do nothing.
The stark setting in New South Wales, beautiful to some and terrifying to others, was described in a visual way (like a still-life?) that provokes emotion and thought: the old cemetery with trees and the newer part a lawn with orderly identical headstones and faded plastic flowers here and there; the boulders in the larger landscape; the weather in which scenes in the novel take place.
Local place names in such variety would provide orientation to inhabitants of a nearly undifferentiated expanse; but in this novel they seem enigmatic, part of the mood.
This short novel, about 150 pages, tells the story of Ruth, who raises her granddaughter Lily, because Lily’s mother/Ruth’s daughter, Eleanor, is addicted to drugs.
After someone dies of an overdose in Eleanor’s apartment, Ruth hands her daughter an envelope of cash and takes Lily home with her, and Lily, as she grows, is a delightful and loving, if overly self aware, well behaved child, and the relationship between her and Ruth is touching, powerful, and hopeful.
We all agreed we are glad we read Susan Boyt’s beautifully written novel. Several readers found it compelling and read it in one big gulp, while some of us found it so intense we had to read in small installments. This poignant novel is filled with so many insights that those of us who take notes or use post its, found phrases and words to savor on nearly every page–far too many for us to share.
We alladmire Ruth, the mother of a daughter who at age thirteen begins to fulfill every parent’s fears–turning to drugs and addicts and avoiding and refusing all of Ruth’s attempts to connect, to please her, to alter her own behaviour in hopes of connecting.
Boyt’s portrayal of Ruth and her estranged daughter is clear eyed, non-judgemental and heartbreaking. We soon realize that this story will not include an amazing recovery, rehab program, or fairy tale ending, but Ruth is able to rescue the already addicted emaciated baby Lily, and the story of her raising Lily is filled with love. Like Tillie Olsen’s stories, Boyt captures the sensual quality of a baby’s skin, the intoxicating pleasure of skin on skin, laughter and delight despite Ruth’s serious insecurity, and doubting herself.
One reader did a bit of research on the author learning she is one of Lucien Freud’s fourteen children and though not an analyst as our last author was, had trained as a bereavement counselor.
We discussed the stereotypes of children of addicts, the notions that the body never forgets trauma, and we appreciated the book’s depiction of a healthy life ahead of Lily who is fifteen at the novel’s end. Lily might be described as a parentified child, aware from her reading and experience that her mother is lost to her, but the generosity of her grandmother and her grandmother’s community, despite economic and emotional hardship, leaves us hopeful for her future.
We talked about the title, taken from a tombstone and the many ways it can be parsed. How do you read the words?
This is British writer Susie Boyt’s seventh novel, and the first to be published in the United States, and I hope its success means more of her books will be available here. I have a sense many of us will be looking for them. hungry for more of her insightful stories.
In her debut collection of short stories, Cat Brushing, 80-year-old British author Jane Campbell aims to set the record straight about “women of a certain age.”
I will share from the The San Francisco Chronicle review of the collection at some length, as I found it useful context, and you may as well:
what began in 2017 as an impromptu sketch piece inspired by a two-week holiday in Bermuda with her eldest son and daughter-in-law turned into a no-holds-barred collection of 13 dirty, doughty and often wickedly funny stories that cover everything from common misconceptions about aging (no, grandmothers aren’t only there to serve their grandchildren, and, yes, their thinking processes can be just as deep and nuanced as they were at a youthful 30) to erotic desire (or the long-overdue liberation from sexual obligation) to retaining agency as “an oldie.” The best part? They’re all narrated by mouthy women who are through with being patronized.
This, like most of the reviews I read, suggest the collection is rather delicious fun, using terms such as “wickedly funny” or “delightfully shocking.” However, upon reading the collection I was struck that many of the stories offer a pattern that is far darker: elderly female characters finally do what they want, which feels cathartic and empowering but only briefly, as most of the stories close bleakly, with the women bound under the judgment of others.
I wondered how we would respond, given our status as elderly readers,some of us older than Campbell when she published the stories about women in our age cohort.
I had purchased the hardcover copy soon after its publication, but set it aside and so listened to the stories because of my macular degeneration. Then, at our meeting, I had trouble getting onto the zoom link and missed the first part of group discussion. Discombobulated by the problems, I forgot to take any notes.
However, in response to my plea for help, Diane, Annette, and Patricia provided excellent notes, making it possible for me to give you a glimpse of our group’s responses to the collection.
At least three of us did not like the collected stories overall, but altered our dissatisfaction as we listened to other group members. One common complaint was the recurrence of abrupt negative endings that overwhelmed what had been a generally positive or capacious take on the older woman’s experience.
Many of us noted the ways the collection demonstrates how traumatic childhood experiences, such as incest or extreme emotional distance from a parent, do not disappear with age.
We also noticed that Campbell kept our focus on the elderly woman’s experience by providing indirect clues rather than didactic explication or description, and that these clues got us thinking about the likely relationships between the character and significant people in her life.
Some of the most shocking stories portray women choosing dramatic deaths–from cutting in the bath to be discovered by visiting adult offspring who are more distressed by the mess than the loss of their parent to the suicide of a woman whose youthful affair has remained the love of her life in memory but was just a fling for the man she has stalked. These stories prompted conversations about the potentially stark differences between individual memories of events and the pain that such differences can cause.
We appreciated the tender story that opens the collection in which Susan, a bedridden elderly woman is ready for death until she unexpectedly experiences desire for Miffy, the young caregiver and rediscovers the importance of touch. We were struck by how the story’s description of loving touch, outside the “norms” of traditional erotica or caregiving, contrasts to the superficial programmed way of caring portrayed by others.
We were somewhat amused by the Schopenhauer story’s ending in which the woman manages to destroy her robot caaretaker, and we discussed this hostile substitute for human companions and helpers. Those of us who had read Ishiguru’s Klara and the Sun noted the strong contrast with Kim and Klara, yet how both were designed to be a companion for a lonely human.
We speculated that Campbell’s long career as an analyst may have influenced her fictional portrayals. I had purchased her first novel, published two years after the short story collection, and after our discussion I found it in my library. Freudian analysis plays a central part, and is nearly a character of its own, both in that novel and in Cat Brushing. In the end, we agreed that, Campbell’s text provokes thought, if not pleasure.
“Like many fairy tales, there are many different ways it is told, but it always begins the same. An old man and an old woman live happily in their small cottage in the forest, but for one sorrow: they have no children of their own. One winter’s day, they build a girl of snow.”
The Snow Child is based on the Russian folktale Snegurochk, which means “Snow Maiden,” about a couple who build a child out of snow.
The novel is set in Alaska in 1920; it tells the story of Jack and Mabel, a couple trying to forge a new life in the wilderness where they moved a little less than two years after their only child was stillborn. They are homesteaders, clearing land and hoping to farm it in order to claim the land as their own.
Place is central in this novel. Ivey was raised in Alaska and still lives there; and as TheGuardian review notes, the novel, her debut. “is so saturated with wilderness atmosphere that you almost feel you’ve been there yourself.” Her love for this challenging landscape shines through, and we appreciated her narrative’s tremendous capacity to situate us in a place none of us are familiar with.
When Jack is injured, Mabel, who arrived in Alaska with book learning and a skill for fine work, steps up to the physical challenges of sowing potatoes and reeling in fish. We appreciate her strength.
Mabel and Jack both develop over the course of the novel, and Jack is portrayed with as much tenderness as Mabel. The Snow Child narrates the growth of both partners within a single marriage over a long period as gender roles and preconceived notions gradually loosen in the shared hardship of their new life.
One day, the couple playfully builds a snowgirl, but the next morning she is gone. Instead, they start to catch glimpses of a small blond girl off in the trees. The novel’s fairy tale origins are strong, and at times you find yourself wondering if poor Mabel and Jack will be sucked into some occult fairyland of deathless ice maidens, Angela Carter-style. Or will they simply buckle down to mending their damaged relationship, bonding over the muddy rows of potato seedlings in a more heartwarming result?
Retelling fairy tales allows a writer to experiment with setting and character development, but always in the background is the plot of the original tale. Although Mabel’s sister assures her that she can write new endings, as readers we cannot escape the outlines of the tales that have been pulled into the light. We know in our bones that the Snow Maiden, that elusive girl who offers them a new chance, cannot exist in “real life”– she thrives in the ice and snow and freedom of living on her own in nature. The baby boy she births helps Mabel and Jack and ties up the story’s loose ends but it is a mere fantasy ending that we did not feel replaced the far more convincing ending of the original tale. The novel’s conclusion wraps all up in a magical heartwarming fashion that left us unconvinced.
However, our conversation was lively, and as we listened to each other we each recalled details that made the characters and the setting feel real and nuanced despite the end result of a bit too sweet of an ending.
In case you are interested: there is a musical is based on this tale! Check out the NPR story:
The premise of Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is pretty compelling: Nikki, a young British-Punjabi woman, takes a creative writing job at her local temple, hoping to emancipate the community’s women with her modern ideals. She finds the women she’s teaching are barely literate widows who have no interest in her grand plans. But these women, who’ve spent their lives in the shadows of fathers, brothers, and husbands, have incredibly rich inner lives and some very interesting, and very spicy, stories to tell.
What really stands out about this novel is how it centers women who are typically ignored—in this case, older widows in the Punjabi community. As one reviewer put it, Kaur Jaswal gives voices to women who are generally voiceless, and she lets them talk about sex, no less. It’s a bold move that crashes through conventions and insists that every woman, no matter how invisible she may seem, has stories worth telling and deserves to be heard.
When we met on Zoom, I wasn’t sure how the conversation would go. I’d listened to the audiobook and found myself experiencing a weird mix of embarrassment, fascination, and unexpected interest—probably thanks to my Evangelical upbringing. The creative fruit and vegetable metaphors amused me (banana and cucumber I’d heard of at bridal showers, but aubergine and eggplant were new!).
However, what really drove our discussion was not the novel’s sexy shock value; instead, we dove into its many layers—arranged marriages, oppressive gender roles, double standards, generational cultural clashes, and even a murder mystery woven throughout.
As reviewers have noted, this book is wildly ambitious. It’s an immigrant novel in the tradition of The Joy Luck Club and White Teeth that offers serious commentary on the daily subjugation of women, as well as a murder mystery, a romance, and so forth. That’s a tough balance, and sometimes the book felt overwhelming with its multiple plots and stories-within-stories.
We noticed the generally negative portrayal of men in the novel, which contrasted with the actual Sikh men some of us have known. It made us think about how few fully realized, decent men appear in women’s fiction generally, perhaps because of the generally oppressive nature of the way various social systems uphold misogyny and the real risks women face from those systems, both at a general and personal level of violence or erasure.
We loved certain characters who felt fully developed (though honestly, most of the widows blurred together after a while, which we found a problem). The climactic scene of the older women’s collective capacity to rescue the younger more modern woman was powerful. However, the novel wraps up rather quickly with all loose ends tied up: it felt a bit too tidy.
The book deserves praise for its sympathetic portrayal of women across generations—the widows, the younger women, and their parents—all struggling for independence, love, and achievement in a larger society marked by racism, sexism, and materialism.
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows may not be perfect, but it’s a novel that makes you think, laugh, and see the invisible women around you in a whole new light.
There are three things you should know about Elsie. The first thing is that she’s my best friend. The second is that she always knows what to say to make me feel better. And the third thing…might take a bit more explaining.
Eighty-four-year-old Florence has fallen in her flat at Cherry Tree Home for the Elderly. As she waits to be rescued, she thinks about her friend Elsie and wonders if a terrible secret from their past is about to come to light. If the charming new resident is who he claims to be, why does he look exactly like a man who died sixty years ago?
Booklist describes the novel as
a tender and charismatic look into life in a nursing home. Cannon effortlessly captures the home’s slow routines, along with the ways that staff and residents coexist but often know little about each other . . .
When we met on Monday afternoon to discuss this novel, we all agreed we were glad we read it, but, perhaps predictably in a novel that focuses on the confusions of memory and truth, each of us had questions about the actual facts of the plot.
We were not all sure what was actually “the truth” about Elsie, or about Florence, and we differed about certain “facts” in the novel about the past.
Spoilers ahead! Don’t Read if you don’t want to know what happens!
For example, we asked each another: When did it first become obvious to you that Elsie was not a resident of the home? When did Elsie die? Did she die in the fire Florence mistakenly believed she had caused?
Several of us realized Elsie was not present in the retirement residence but did not realize she died in the fire. We all knew Elsie was Florence’s best friend, that they were very close friends, but not that Flo’s only love was Elsie, that after Elsie died, Florence never married or had children because she, Elsie, was her true love.
We talked about the retirement home, our own determination to avoid such places if possible, the patronizing tone of Miss Bissel and Miss Abrose toward the residents, the tendency to disbelieve those who are forgetful and tending toward dementia.
We agreed that Cannon’s characters–both residents and staff–were believable and well drawn. We praised her handling of the braided plots, Flo’s memories as well as the mystery plot. We appreciated the writing, and all of us had favorite lines, too many to record even with the help of post-its or underlining.
The ending felt forced for some of us. Rodney’s arrest after so many years, the likelihood that he would end up at the same retirement home as Florence after so many decades. And that he would have access to her flat in his attempts to undermine her testimony about the past by accentuating her dementia.
We speculated about the significance of the jet black amulet Flo notices beneath the baseboards from her fallen position on the floor.
We recognized the plot resembles what I label “deathbed bookends” in my book of old ladies, and yet we did not want to critique Cannon as we hadSusan Minot for using this plot structure. After a bit, we realized Minot had placed as the emotional center of her novel an unrequired sexual encounter from the protagonists’ past whereas Cannon provided a much fuller portrait of Flo’s current life and explored the aftermath of trauma.
Around the edges of our focus on the novel, we exchanged some of our own experiences: from visiting family members in such retirement homes, to differentiating between dementia and normal cognitive lapses, to experiences being patronized by younger people who call is by diminutive labels or refer to us in third person.
We liked Flo, and we wondered when she began considering Elsie was present, when Elsie was part of herself. Was the third thing about Elsie that Elsie had died? Was it that she loved Elsie? What do you think?
August 11th was our first week back from our summer break!
We faced a variety of technological issues that could have derailed us: my computer would not work, and I had to meet via the phone (a challenge even without my vision loss!); another member ‘s hearing aids were not properly working with her zoom connection, and so forth, but we were not deterred!
Our shared generosity and good humor, our delight at making it back to the group, reminds me of how important our book discussions are, and how important community is. We do our best to show up for one another, regardless of how many pages were each able to read between caretaking and the overwhelming tasks I lump under “maintenance” of our aging bodies and living spaces, gardens, responsibilities to beloved family and friends, and simply managing in these complicated and upsetting times.
And the book? Well, we agreed it was a distraction from the chaos of local and world politics and and frequent despair.
We enjoyed some parts about it but we also found the writing was not equal to what we usually encounter. We are experienced readers, not critics, and yet reading this novel reminded us of what we often take for granted in the books we select: we assume excellent writing, or at least writing that does not make us glitch as we read. This book’s prose did not impress us, and we wondered if the author’s work as a television producer influenced the style.
The novel tells the story of Mrs Jenny Quinn, who, after fifty-nine years of marriage, as her husband Bernard’s health declines, and her friends’ lives are increasingly focused on grandchildren—which Jenny and Bernard do not have—secretly applies to be a contestant on the prime-time TV show “Britain Bakes.”
While she delights in the experience, the competition starts to unearth memories buried decades ago. Chocolate teacakes remind her of a furtive errand involving a wedding ring; sugared doughnuts call up a stranger’s kind act; a simple cottage loaf brings back the moment her life changed forever. Jenny struggles to keep a lid on a long-concealed secret that she has kept from her husband.
As readers, our group expects major characters to learn or develop from their experiences, and we sometimes experience our own expansion of insight, humanity, or knowledge as readers. In this case, we were less transformed or expanded by the reading than we might have hoped, but we, as always, brought to it our own interests and biases and the book thus that created an enjoyable discussion.
Some of us are bakers and enjoyed the recipes even as we would probably not not bake such sugary confections. Some enjoy the “Great British Bake Off” and appreciated the behind the scenes descriptions of competition.
Most of us liked Jenny Quinn, though we differed in our understanding of her secrecy from her beloved Bernard. Why did she never tell him why she did not want children? And why did she keep her application to the baking competition a secret?
We differed among ourselves as to the deeper causes of her secrecy. Was she so wounded by her experience as a seventeen year old giving birth in a home for unwed mothers that she was terrified Bernard would not marry her if she told him about that experience? And was she right that he would not love her if he knew the truth? We felt surely he would not have have stopped loving her or left her after years of close marriage if she confided in him. Even those of us who tried to understand or at least not judge her had a hard time understanding the lesser secrecy regarding the baking competition which made little sense to us as readers. Jenny’s total naivete regarding social media was also difficult for us to accept, especially given the presence of young relatives in her life.
The serious plot of Jenny’s past experience hit some of us by surprise in the ways it was dropped into the plot. Unlike for example Claire Keegan’s fiction (which we also read for our group), this novel did not increase our historical knowledge or particularly move us.
I doubt that any of us will recommend this novel to our friends, but we all agreed it was a nice distraction from the news, a good enough summer “beach read,” and we really enjoyed being back from our summer vacation and reading and talking together again. Remember! We’d love you to read with us! Send us your thoughts! Either here or through email!
A little background: Our book group’s origin was my final course before full retirement from Mills College in the Spring of 2020; it was a wonderful collaboration between a Mills English course “Coming to Age” and the Downtown Oakland Senior Center, in which students and seniors met together. The pandemic cut short our in-person discussions, and we turned to Zoom. After the semester ended, members of the senior center proposed we continue on Zoom on our own.
At first, I continued to select the books and was responsible for coming up with discussion prompts, but over time our process changed in wonderful ways. For example, at each meeting now, every member shows up prepared to call our attention to a particular passage or to consider a question or theme. We never know in advance where our discussions will lead, and it is wonderful to note the similarities and differences between what captures our attention and how we have responded to the passages, and texts, we have chosen.
We meet in sessions that generally run about eight meetings (or four per month). We meet twice a month over the session, and we all participate in selecting books. Before the end of each session, we all submit titles and brief descriptions of two or three books we have read and recommend. Two members, Patricia and Carole, helpfully type up the list and send a group email. Then, at the session’s final meeting, we vote to select eight books for the next.
We focus primarily on fiction (novels or short story collections)by women that feature an old woman as protagonist. Occasionally, we select fiction by a man or we digress from fiction to a collection of essays. However, over the five years we have been meeting, most of our selections fall into our original category: fiction by women with older women protagonists.
If you’d like to read along, our fall/winter session is August 11-November 24.
August 11: Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford. 2024; 384 pages.
August 25: Three Things About Elsie by Joanna Cannon.
2018; 372 pages.
September 8: Erotic Stories of Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal. 2017; 304 pages.
September 22: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. 2012; 389 pages.
October 13: Cat Brushing and Other Stories by Jane Campbell; 2022. 245 pages.
October 27: Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt; 2021. 208 pages.
November 10: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabith Almeddine; 2012; 291 pages.
November 24: Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. 2024; 320 pages.
Following the loss of her husband and son, 83 year old Helen Cartwright returns to the village of her childhood after living abroad for six decades. Her only wish is to die quickly and without fuss. She retreats into her home on Westminster Crescent, becoming a creature of routine and habit: “Each day was an impersonation of the one before with only a slight shuffle–as though even for death there is a queue.”
Then, one cold winter night, a chance encounter with a mouse sets Helen on a surprising journey. Over the course of two weeks in a small English town, this reclusive widow discovers an unexpected reason to live.
A Southern Review of Books reviewer notes that “Booy depicts aging and atrophy, loneliness and invisibility, with compassion,” and we largely agreed. Our responses to the book were mostly positive, from simply loving it to enjoying its fairytale qualities. The least positive was “I didn’t hate it” from a reader who prefers more character development and would have liked to know more of Helen’s inner life.
A reader in the group pointed out the effects of the author’s portrayal in minute detail of the repetition in Helen’s day, including the order of TV shows, the blurring of news from which she feels disconnected. We brought in many of our own observations about the invisibility of the elderly, the difficulty of making new friends late in life, and the value of community.
It is no longer Helen’s world to think about. And in her mind it is the same news over and over again, with the only difference being that people think they’re hearing it for the first time. When there is a string of robberies in the village, Helen thinks, “But what does she have to steal? This is a place where everything of value has already been taken.”
We were surprised when we learned Helen had been a famous cardiologist in Australia, and we wondered what prompted her to return to her birthplace after so many decades. We wondered if she had friends, and noting Helen’s remarks about Dr. Jamal’s kindness as so different from her own way with patients, we considered that she may have been as single minded and unkind as Dr. Swenson in State of Wonder.
I think we all found her relationship with the small mouse heart warming, regardless of its probability. We may have laughed a bit at her sudden conversion to vegetarianism, but we agreed on the need for relationships with other people and were happy to see her come out of her depressive isolation and desire to die.
Stories such as Sipsworth can transport us away from the quotidian dailiness of our lives, just as the mouse transports Helen, opening us to delight and hope beyond the chaos of the broken world. Like the fairytales of our childhoods, such stories, however fantastic, can awaken us to the power of kindness and connection and care,
We were a bit amused that this series included three tales of elderly women and animals from the octopus of Brightness to the parrots of How to Read a Book to the small mouse of Sipsworth. Common to all three of these very different stories was a move, through a connection with the animal, from loneliness and loss to newfound community and possibility.
Ruth O. Saxton 