The Women Behind the Door
A Novel
-
-
3.0 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
“A showdown between mother and daughter that is about as emotionally painful as it gets.” —Fiona Maazel, The New York Times
A powerful, moving mother-daughter story filled with struggle and redemption by Booker-Prize winning author Roddy Doyle
At sixty-six, Paula Spencer—mother, grandmother, widow, addict, survivor—has finally started to live her life. She has a job at the dry cleaners she enjoys, her boyfriend Joe is a text away when she needs him, and her four children now have the healthy families and petty dramas that Paula could have only hoped for. Despite its ghosts, Paula has started to push her past aside.
That is until her eldest, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep one day. Nicola is everything Paula wasn’t—independent, affluent, a loving wife and mother, a “success”—but now she is suddenly determined to leave it all behind. She has left her family and come to stay. As Nicola gradually confides in Paula the secret that unleashed this moment of crisis, mother and daughter must untangle past memory, trauma, and revelations to confront what they mean to each other—and who they want to be.
A timely and powerful novel of regrets, reparations, and reconciliations, The Women Behind the Door is a delicately devastating portrait of shame and the inescapable shadow it casts over families. Many readers will welcome the chance to reconnect with this strong, singular character whom we have seen in The Woman Who Walked into Doors and Paula Spencer, but all readers will be glad to have Paula in their life now.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Few novelists have captured the emotion, humor, and beauty of a heart-to-heart conversation like Roddy Doyle does in this splendid novel. In 2021, 66-year-old Dubliner Paula Spencer is finally at peace. Her abusive ex is dead, and she has a nice, quiet life chatting with her friend Mary and seeing her boyfriend, Joe, when they’re not separated by lockdown. But when Paula’s eldest, Nicola, comes back home—without her husband or kids—Paula feels her hard-fought stability slipping away. Especially since Nicola, who was so sensible when a younger Paula was fighting her own demons, doesn’t want her mother’s help now that it’s her turn. The dialogue between these women—direct, straightforward, and both laugh-out-loud funny and tearfully intense—is simply breathtaking, and this slim but powerful novel absolutely flies past because of it. You don’t need to have read Doyle’s two previous books about Paula, The Woman Who Walked into Doors and Paula Spencer, to fall for her.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Booker Prize winner Doyle's third Paula Spencer novel (after 1996's The Woman Who Walked into Doors and 2006's Paula Spencer) is an emotionally raw mother-daughter drama. Paula, a widow in her mid-60s, who's in recovery for alcoholism, returns home from her Covid-19 vaccine appointment in May 2021 to find her 40-something daughter Nicola waiting for her. Nicola, who cared for Paula during earlier family crises and has continued to supplement her mom's finances, seems content to be mothered for a change. For reasons that don't come out until later, she's left her husband and children behind. Over the next 18 months, as Paula deals with a nasty bout of the virus and worries about money, Doyle eventually works up to revealing why Nicola came to stay with her. If that disclosure is somewhat anticlimactic, it's ultimately less important than Paula's reaction to Nicola's news, which comes to shape her understanding not only of their fraught relationship but also of how her own past traumas impacted Nicola. Despite these revelatory conversations, Nicola remains something of a cipher; Paula, on the other hand, is a richly complex character who continues to redefine herself while also contending with her regrets and past failures. Doyle's compassionate chronicle of recovery and reconciliation is worth seeking out.
