Therese is stuck in a dead-end job in a New York department store with a boyfriend she doesn't love. It is, in short, a love story between a 19-year-old girl and an older woman. This was Patricia Highsmith's only novel explicitly about a lesbian affair, and the first such mainstream book with a happy ending. The Price of Salt, later published as Carol, by Patricia Highsmith (1952) There are no spare parts to this story – it is, as the critic Robert McCrum put it, a gorgeously written “study of grief and the aftermath of a gay marriage… unique, brilliant, and deeply moving, with not a word wasted.” He teaches a class, has a row with some neighbours, hits the gym, has a boozy dinner with a female friend before she makes a pass at him, and so on. Rather, he is doing his best to make it through each day by trying to make some connection with the world and the people left in it. George is a middle-aged Englishman living in California in the 1960s.īut he isn't annihilated by grief.
The story follows George across a single day of his life – more a void than a life since Jim was killed in a car crash not long ago. "One of the things I'm proudest of is that I managed to convert an event that seemed to me hideously tragic at the time to a comedy,” Ephron wrote defending the autobiographical nature of the novel, “and if that's not fiction, I don't know what is.”Ī Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1965)įew books have managed to encapsulate the utter grinding pain of losing the person closest to you as Christoper Isherwood's masterwork about a university lecturer struggling to come to terms with the death of his partner. Really a thinly veiled mirror to Ephron's own experience, it follows Rachel, a successful cookery writer who discovers seven months into her second pregnancy that her husband is having an affair (same thing happened to Ephron with the journalist Carl Bernstein).Īwash with all the wit, wisdom and side-splitting style that made Ephron one of the most sought-after creative minds of the past 30 years, it is a masterclass in turning heartache into hilarity as Rachel deals with the (shockingly awful) betrayal and its aftermath with sensational dignity. The story behind Heartburn is heart-wrenching. But read her first and only novel, and you'll see she was capable of so much more. She could – to borrow Clive James' famous quip – turn a phrase until it caught the light. Most people know Nora Ephron for her superhuman gift for a pithy one-liner (“I'll have what she's having”, given to When Harry Met Sally, might be her most famous). Sifting gently through the issues that infiltrate sex and passion after 40, Hadley's whispering prose is a delight as it needles the ennui that can creep into middle-aged existence while reminding us of the confounding duality of social class – it can be both a prison and an escape. Without him, an armada of uncomfortable truths materialises through the fog of their past. But – as they contemplate their personal memories of Zachary and the influence he had on each of their lives – they are faced with the jarring realisation that their lifelong friendship might not endure his loss. When art-dealer Zachary dies of a sudden heart attack, his widow, Lydia, moves in with Christine and Alex. picks up on all the contradictions of human existence.” about the quotidian aches of marriage, parenthood, ageing and friendship would be grating,” wrote the critic Johanna Thomas-Corr. In this life-affirming tale about aging and adultery, the lives of two close-knit middle-class couples – with a tangled erotic past – are pitched skyward when one of them dies. While Webster is in his 60s, this Booker-winning novella provides a poignant and moving lesson on the elusive nature of memory and time. Only, memory is a rusty clock, and can often get more things wrong than it can get right, as he learns when the diary of a university friend who committed suicide 40 years earlier is left to him in another friend's will. He reflects upon his student days, his first love and the momentous moments of his life with the unreliable certainty that what happened really happened merely because he remembers it. He has a daughter, too, and he looks back at his youth in a bid to find some meaning in it. Tony Webster, Barnes' narrator, is retired with a good career behind him and an amicable divorce. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.” “How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. “How often do we tell our own life story?” writes Barnes in this thought-provoking meditation on memory, mortality and regret.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (2011)