womI am 3/4 of the way through Claire Messud’s newest novel, The Woman Upstairs and am having trouble putting it down long enough to finish this blog.

The narrator of this novel is angry–angry that she is moderately successful (an elementary school teacher), reliable (she calls her father every day and helped care for her dying mother), and boring. In short, everything your parents wanted you to grow up to become, but upon achieving, you realize it would have been a lot more fun to have messed around a bit.

How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.

I’m a good girl, I”m a nice girl, I’m a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody’s boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parent’s shit and my brother’s shit, and I’m not a girl anyhow, I”m over forty fucking years old, and I”m good at my job and I”m great with kids and I held my mother’s hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephone–every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because it’s pretty gray and a bit muggy too? It was supposed to say ‘Great Artist’ on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say ‘such a good teacher/daughter/friend’ instead.

But this novel isn’t just a series of angry rants. It is a portrait of relationships–their saving and destructive power. Messud is at her best in describing the minutiae of life. The way light pools in a dark room. The feel of winter on a walk home. The way a new friend can rattle your daily life.

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