It is exquisite in its poignancy.
At first, I was apprehensive about reading a novel in which the narrator’s husband is dying of pancreatic cancer. The pain is raw, and the description of his suffering is graphic.
But then, the novel evolves into being more about her than him. Suddenly, quite near the end, she discloses an attraction to a man who is only called A; he has come to meet her on a book tour for one of her books in Guadalajara, Mexico.
She does not betray her husband. She writes this about meeting him four years earlier:
It was when I was writing Over the Mountain that I met you. I wrote myself into a place then where our coming together became possible, I knew that the work I was doing in writing that novel, approaching the girl-child parts of me from which I’ve detached myself all my life, despised and shunned, was in order to ready myself to live in nearness to another person and love them. Because if I couldn’t be near the vulnerable, soft and silly girly parts of me, the parts that so yearned for affection, how could I believe I could ever allow another person to be? Another person can’t make me love what I despise about myself, therefore if I hate myself I can never feel loved. And I longed for someone to love. (p. 108)
We learn about the process of dying, as we read, and what it does to a couple who love each other. But perhaps more importantly, to me at least, we learn about how we must also love ourselves.
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