Literary Wives is an on-line book group that examines the meaning and role of wife in different books. Every other month, we post and discuss a book with this question in mind:
What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?
Don’t forget to check out the other members of Literary Wives to see what they have to say about the book!
- Ariel at One Little Library
- Kay at What Me Read
- Lynn at Smoke & Mirrors
- Kate at Kate Rae Davis; Reading Culture, Finding God
- TJ at My Book Strings
- Eva at The Paperback Princess
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
I read this book a couple of years ago when it first came out, but it wasn’t really my thing. I didn’t ever feel connected, invested, or drawn in. The book is full of thoughts/short vignettes that make up a story. Her thoughts are beautifully written; but as a novel, it wasn’t what I was expecting.
After re-reading (or more like re-skimming, because the book only just arrived two days ago), I wasn’t as disappointed with it. I guess this time I knew what I was getting.
What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?
This book is about a deteriorating marriage. The marriage starts off happy and hopeful, but then things begin to go south. We get bits and pieces of the details of daily life with a husband and a child; trying to comfort a colicky baby, washing chunks of vomit out of your hair, cleaning up the dinner plates. We get a clear picture of how scattered the mother feels with all the things she has to do and worry about.
The wife (she has no name) comes to feel as though she doesn’t have enough left over for herself, her writing, her career. She feels as though she’s the one making all the sacrifices.
I would give it up for her, everything, the hours alone, the radiant book, the postage stamp in my likeness, but only if she would consent to lie quietly with me until she is eighteen.
In addition, after everything she’s given to her family, her husband cheats on her; a sad story, but not a very surprising one.
“I think I was afraid to go all in,” she says. “Because all in is terrifying. With all in, you lose everything.”
This got me thinking about the sacrifices we make when we have children, and who makes them? In my case, I was the one to make most of them, but I chose to; I even planned to. Maybe if that had not been the case, or if I regretted my decision (which I do not), my husband and I would no longer be married? How does each couple manage to work this out?
But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.
One thing from the book that has stayed with me all this time is the way the wife felt as a new mom; alone, with all the hours of the day stretched out before her as her husband leaves for work each day, and wondering how they will be filled.
After you left for work, I would stare at the door as if it might open again.
What did you do today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.
Even though I was a happy new mom, I can still remember how it felt every morning when my husband left and it was just me and the baby (or me and the baby and the toddler and the pre-schooler) for the rest of the day. Sometimes it felt like an eternity. Our days were so full, yet I had nothing to show for them.
A favourite line: “I remember the first time I said the word to a stranger. “It’s for my daughter,” I said. My heart was beating too fast, as if I might be arrested.”
Because I didn’t get to fully re-read, I feel sure I missed a thousand things about what this book says about being a wife. Be sure to check out the other Literary Wives to see what they have to say! Also, enjoy this thought-provoking snippet of Roxane Gay’s review of the book in the New York Times:
“Of course he falls because he has been placed, quite grandly, on a pedestal for the wife to admire him more than actually be married to him. But maybe that is what happens in love and marriage. We admire from a distance, and we look away when we get too close and see what is actually there.” ” For better or worse, this is not so much a book about their marriage; it is a book about the wife’s marriage. It would be interesting to read the other story to this marriage, to know more of the husband, the father — but Offill still makes it seem as if the wife’s version of the marriage is story enough and, perhaps, the only story that matters. “
Next book, December 4th: A Lady and Her Husband by Amber Reeves
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