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.
“The Women Behind the Door” reads like a blow-by-blow of Paula’s inner life over a few scattered days during “the Covid.” She is plagued by self-scrutiny and accosted by feelings that run the gamut.
Early on, Doyle settles on a method for rendering the flux of these feelings and returns to that method diligently:
She brings the tea with her, in to the telly. She won’t be drinking it, even if it is good for the calmness. The steam will keep her company. And she’s perfectly calm. She’s even a bit elated. She’s had a great day.
She turns on the telly. There’s always the delay, when the screen stays black and she half-expects nothing to happen. But there it is now — she’ll get another night out of it. She expects everything she has to break. Everything in the house that has a switch or a button. Every friendship, every relationship. Her family.
But it really has been a great day.
See how Doyle did that? The quick, almost savage, waver between moods?
Hundreds of pages later, Paula overhears a tense conversation between Nicola and her husband, Tony, and wrestles with where to focus her compassion and pity in the context of her own abuse. She debates what she calls the “inbuilt thing” — the will to blame women for how men hurt them:
The inbuilt thing — it isn’t inbuilt or natural. It was put in there. The poor man. People saw her after she’d been battered numb and they’d sympathized with Charlo. And she had too — she’d been the one to blame. She’d believed that. She’d got what was coming to her. What are we going to do with her, Paula? She’d nearly fallen for it. She had fallen for it. She’ll be grand — don’t worry. Give her time.
Even now.
Even now, she’s feeling sorry for him, out there.
The novel is full of passages like this that portray a woman whose misery and anger, uncertainty and struggle, radiate unexpectedly. A lesser writer would have stopped one sentence earlier.
There’s much to admire here. And for Doyle fans, the novel will feel familiar: It is unflinching and dark, brutal in its economy, wry and mostly devastating.
So: Does Doyle get to write in Paula’s voice because he’s an excellent writer? Or should he have acknowledged the problem of the violating gender writing on behalf of the victim and deployed his talents elsewhere? The answer to both questions, for me, is yes. Which gets at what’s interesting here — less the questions or the opposing feelings, but how to live with them. I suggested earlier there are two options: resolution or sitting with the discomfort of irresolution. But Paula’s experience suggests a third option, which seems more realistic and full of pathos: How about we just soldier through the war of our feelings, one day at a time?
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