By Marian Keyes, 2017

I remember my forties as my most difficult decade. It was made difficult by my younger son’s collision with the education system, my feelings that I should have done something more or at least different with my life, and the fluctuating hormones of the perimenopause. These combined stressors contributed to a deep depression and thoughts of suicide.

Because I remember that terrible decade very clearly, it was easy for me to empathize with Amy O’Connell, the 44-year-old protagonist of this 570-page novel.

It is a rollicking good read, very different from most of the books I read and write about. The dialogue crackles with life, and there are many bits that are very funny. Few short books manage to be this funny; this long book had me chuckling and smiling throughout (I seldom guffaw—often I don’t get the joke or I get the wrong joke).

I bought my copy at the Value Village on Whyte Avenue on a day when all books were 50 percent off. It came to me seriously bent out of shape, as though it had been held in one hand by a reader who was holding a baby or stirring a pot with the other. Arthritis in both thumbs prevents me from reading in this way, but the shape it came in was a good indicator of how engrossing a book it would be.

Amy has a demanding job in public relations. While trying to find a celebrity willing to be a spokesperson for adult diapers, she is also working to rehabilitate the reputations of a serious male journalist who has been caught shagging the nanny and a noted actress who has been arrested for buying prescription drugs from undercover police. One of five adult children in a lively Irish family that meets every Friday for a takeaway meal at their elderly parents’ home, she feels stressed out by work, by a perennial shortage of money, by the mothering of three daughters on the cusp of adulthood, by her father’s dementia and her mother’s need for more caregiving support, by the emotional withdrawal of her husband. Amy is on the verge of being an alcoholic, sometimes over the verge, and addicted to on-line shopping for new and vintage clothing and accessories. Like many women, she is racked by insecurities about her appearance in general and her weight in particular and the creeping sense that she is past her prime (although it is clear from the way others react to her that she is extremely attractive).

An engaging but self-deluded omniscient narrator, Amy is gobsmacked when her devoted husband Hugh, having come into some money from the estate of his father, announces he is taking a break. This is to be not a separation, not a divorce, just a break from their life together, a six-month back-packing trip through Southeast Asia. If sex with other women happens, it happens –just as he recognizes Amy may be having sex with other men while he is away– but he promises he will be coming back to her and the girls, and that he will not be posting pictures of other women on his Facebook page.

When Hugh makes his shocking announcement, Amy is sure that Hugh, until now a caring husband and a doting father to the three girls (only one of whom is biologically his), needs a break because he is still mourning the deaths of his father and a childhood friend. The unfolding narrative reveals that Amy is not quite so innocent in Hugh’s need for a break as she initially wants to believe. Seeing a posting about him on another woman’s Facebook page leads Amy to pictures of him on a beach in Thailand with this woman in his arms, and convinces Amy that Hugh is not coming back.

Marian Keyes has published numerous novels and also several volumes of non-fiction. An active campaigner on the yes side during the recent abortion referendum in Ireland, she very much wanted children of her own. When she and her husband could not conceive, they chose not to go the adoption or IVF route. Keyes absolutely supports the right of women to be mothers when and how they choose.

A good part of The Break concerns the abortion of one of Amy’s teenage daughters, a fraught experience which requires a trip to England. The abortion pills Amy orders on-line are impounded by customs, and the mere ordering of the pills could have led to a fourteen-year jail sentence. In spite of—some might say because of—the abortion theme, The Break is a testament to the comfort, value and durability of family.

McNally Robinson Books in both Saskatoon and Winnipeg classify Marian Keyes’s writing as fiction, and the work of Edna O’Brien, another Irish woman writer, who in her eighties is still writing great books, as literature. I understand the difference. Some but not all fiction is literature, and it doesn’t have to be both to be enjoyable.

I was extremely happy to find Down by the River, a 1997 novel by O’Brien, in the neatly organized literature section at the back of the otherwise messy and overfull Red River Book Store in the Exchange District on a recent visit to Winnipeg. I paid only $4 for a hardcover in mint condition.

The book opens with a scene of bucolic nature. The lush perfection is destroyed by a terrible story of father-daughter incest. This is the most heinous of crimes, as it violates the father’s obligation to nurture and protect the child, and is an evil expression of his physical, economic, and emotional power

The beauty of the writing and the setting in nature contrast with and emphasize the horror of the story. The girl, who is living alone with her father after the death of her mother, becomes pregnant and almost gets to England for an abortion, but then is apprehended and returned to her father (who is still her legal guardian). When investigation determines the pregnancy is the result of incest, the case goes to the high court.

Published in 1997, Down by the River draws on real-life situations and characters. There is no supportive community gathered around the lonely girl, as there is in The Break. I found the O’Brien book so horrifying that I was not able to do more than skim its pages, and don’t know if I can bear to keep it on my book shelf. Yesterday I read of a similar case in Indonesia, where a 15-year-old girl who was pregnant after being raped by her brother, was put in jail for having an abortion.

There are times when literature is too much, and fiction is as much as the buffeted reader can handle. There are times when the news is too much, and one must turn away from being any more informed. Like many others, I have been incredulous at much of the recent news–about the only good stories have concerned the rescue of the boys from the cave in Thailand, and the Edmonton teenager born in a refugee camp in Ghana who is amazingly gifted at soccer.

Currently I am nearing the end of Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds by Lyndall Gordon, the choice of one of my book clubs, and a book I found in Winnipeg at Neighbourhood Bookstore and Café for $8.50. It has been soothing to go back more than a century and become absorbed in the life of a family that was in many ways highly dysfunctional, but a family that produced and as best it could nurtured a genius. For me this book has been the best kind of escapism.