I just finished this book, The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer. Now, while I can't really recommend it because it wasn't all that great (only earning a modest 2-stars on Good Reads) but it just hit home in so many small ways.
The basic premise was about a group of women and how they have made the decision to stay home when they had children and the ups and downs of motherhood, many years out of baby-hood, and how they begin wondering about their work days of past and what their life is about now. It is also about four friends and how their lives are so different and how they were all raised in an era of mother's who fought for their rights in the workplace and yanked off that apron of the housewives of years past.
The fact that they are stay at home moms that are more or less disgruntled about their decisions now that their children are well into grade school isn't the problem I had with the book...
The plot moved slowly.
The writer went off on such long tangents that several times I forgot where she was even going originally.
She had these "flashbacks" to all the main characters mothers and how pro-women's-rights they were but by the time I realized what she was doing, I had already missed maybe three of these flashbacks. But, at the end, I couldn't really understand the idea behind including that. I think the story would have moved along just fine without it.
But there was some moments that I thought hit quite close to home...
One character who felt like she had let her profession go because she couldn't get the energy/mojo/creativeness over the years, especially after having children and felt like a loser in many ways.
One character who felt out of place in the area she lived in where kids went to private school and women held high powered jobs and everyone was always trying to keep up with the Jones'.
One character who moved out of the city and into the suburbs and away from her friends and she HATED it there and had made no friends and never left her house.
These groups of women also met almost every morning at a local restaurant to sit, talk, and drink coffee together.
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Here is an excerpt where the one character is trying to convince the character who moved into the suburbs that she needs to find a friend:
"I'm just not interested in the women here, " Jill said simply over the phone to Amy during the first week that school started this fall.
"They can't all be one way. There's got to be one person you'd like. Even just one."
'I'm sure there is." Probably Amy was right, and there were all kinds of women pocketed away in their houses, including smart ones who read demanding books and were invested in what happened in the world around them and were also kind of a kick to be around. But Jill wasn't looking for new friends. "I'm too old," she said.
Here is another one...
When you reached the age of forty, Jill thought, you didn't need new friends. Apparently you shouldn't have new friends; they would only disappoint you.
And another...
She had developed, as Donald said, pathologically introverted tendencies in midlife.
"Locally, you are friendless," he preserved.
"You're my friend," she tried. "And you live locally."
"That is a very pathetic statement. You know what I mean."
"You don't exactly have many friends, Donald. And you don't know ANYONE in Holly Hills."
"True, but I'm a man. We have our poker friends. But the primary difference here is that I'm fairly happy here, or anywhere, really, and you're not." Donald said.
Your personal history of pain, by the time you reached the age of forty, was supposed to have been folded thoroughly into the batter of the self, so that you barely needed to acknowledge it anymore. Jill thought.
This is crazy because Corinna and I have laughed about this very subject and in the back of my mind I can see the two of us like this in our "old age"...
...The city seemed as if it no longer required her presence, the way that once, in her human arrogance, she had felt it did. The buildings would stay, God willing. The lights would blur together, and the subway below would make it all tremble like glassware on a shelf. Jill and her family would be gone for a long time, perhaps for good, thought they would come back and visit frequently. There were yoga classes, and lunches with Amy. She and Amy might never live in the same place again, she knew, until they were old and their husabdns were dead and they shared a cottage somewhere by the sea.
And, the passage that made me cry because it hit home, as MANY issues/plot lines/conversations did in this book:
In the Golden Horn on a Monday morning at the very end of the school year, the owner, Adnan Veysel, said to a waiter, "So where have the ladies in the back been? I don't see them very often."
"Maybe they went to another place," the owner said in answer to his own question. He had noticed that the back booth was less frequently full in the mornings at the start of the school day, or at least that the women who came and sat here lately were not the same ones he had been seeing for years. He saw some younger ones these days, with baby carriages and strollers. Over time he would probably start to forget about the regulars; this new crowd would become the new regulars.
But now, though, he still thought about the women who until recently had come here most mornings. He had never known any of their names, and he saw them only briefly when they first walked in. Different women had joined them from time to time, but it was the four originals who no longer came very often.
He might see one of them sometimes, or maybe another, but they didn't appear consistently anymore, or in a group. In the past they had always lingered after the breakfast rush. But as he thought about it now, he decided that he could not believe they had gone somewhere new; it just didn't seem like something they would do. He imagined that they felt a kind of loyalty toward the Golden Horn, as if it were their school or their house of worship. But now the world, he thought, had taken them.
One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.
