Entertainment
She’s Been to Hell and Back. Now Comes the Reckoning.
In his new novel, Roddy Doyle revisits his character Paula Spencer, a woman managing some fraught feelings. Our reviewer had some fraught feelings of her own.
THE WOMEN BEHIND THE DOOR, by Roddy Doyle
Honestly, friends, as a writer and lifelong reader, I would never tell a male author that he can’t write in a female voice. I just wouldn’t. In 1996, Mary Gordon wrote in a review of “The Woman Who Walked Into Doors,” the first of Roddy Doyle’s novels about the character Paula Spencer: “I’ve never been terribly interested in the question of whether a man can satisfactorily write about a woman’s experience; a good writer can, a bad writer can’t.” Hear, hear.
But in 2024, as a woman on the cusp of 50, having seen what I’ve seen and having experienced so much sexism, as a woman living after the fall of Roe in this new political season of exploded misogyny, I don’t want to hear from a man writing in the voice of a battered, alcoholic older woman (a well-worn template of female suffering). I just don’t. And am pretty sure I’m not alone.
A lot of male writers probably find themselves similarly dismissed, which — I’m just going to say it — fills me with some glee. Isn’t that terrible? And antithetical to principles of empathic engagement and artistic freedom that are really important to me? It sure is. Which leaves me with two options: Resolve the dissonance or just accept that I am home to feelings that are incompatible but equally potent. And that I don’t always feel the way I’d like.
The good news for Doyle is that I read his new Paula Spencer novel, “The Women Behind the Door,” anyway. And that he’s excellent at capturing the kind of tension I’m describing and the fraught stories we tell about ourselves as a result.
Doyle’s been writing about Paula for 30 years. This time, she is in her late 60s: sober, widowed, a grandmother. Even if this is your first encounter with her, you quickly learn that she’s been through hell. She is haunted relentlessly by the past, when she was both victim to an abusive husband and perpetrator of, at minimum, parental negligence as she drank herself into various oblivions that her eldest daughter, Nicola, had to manage.
Now, years later, Nicola returns to her mother’s home in crisis, having left her husband and three children. This sets up a showdown between mother and daughter that is about as emotionally painful as it gets. Certain exchanges are so agonizing to read, I had to stop and cover my face.
