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Overview
"Brilliant" -- The New Yorker
Ten years on from The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Booker Prize-winning author, Roddy Doyle, returns to one of his greatest characters, Paula Spencer.
Paula Spencer is turning forty-eight, and hasn’t had a drink for four months and five days. Her youngest children, Jack and Leanne, are still living with her. They're grand kids, but she worries about Leanne.
Paula still works as a cleaner, but all the others doing the job seem to come from Eastern Europe. You can get a cappuccino in the café and the checkout girls are all Nigerian. Ireland is certainly changing, but then so too is Paula – dry, and determined to put her family back together again. Told with the unmistakable wit of Doyle's unique voice, this is a redemptive tale about a brave and tenacious woman.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780143112730 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/18/2007 |
| Series: | A Paula Spencer Novel , #2 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.07(w) x 7.74(h) x 0.50(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
She copes. A lot of the time. Most of the time. She copes. And sometimes she doesn’t. Cope. At all.
This is one of the bad days.
She could feel it coming. From the minute she woke up. One of those days. It hasn’t let her down.
She’ll be forty-eight in a few weeks. She doesn’t care about that. Not really.
It’s more than four months since she had a drink. Four months and five days. One of those months was February. That’s why she started measuring the time in months. She could jump three days. But it’s a leap year; she had to give one back. Four months, five days. A third of a year. Half a pregnancy, nearly.
A long time.
The drink is only one thing.
She’s on her way home from work. She’s walking from the station. There’s no energy in her. Nothing in her legs. Just pain. Ache. The thing the drink gets down to.
But the drink is only part of it. She’s coped well with the drink. She wants a drink. She doesn’t want a drink. She doesn’t want a drink. She fights it. She wins. She’s proud of that. She’s pleased. She’ll keep going. She knows she will.
But sometimes she wakes up, knowing the one thing. She’s alone.
She still has Jack. Paula wakes him every morning. He’s a great sleeper. It’s a long time now since he was up before her. She’s proud of that too. She sits on his bed. She ruffles his hair. Ruffles — that’s the word. A head made for ruffling. Jack will break hearts.
And she still has Leanne. Mad Leanne. Mad, funny. Mad, good. Mad, brainy. Mad, lovely — and frightening.
They’re not small any more, not kids. Leanne is twenty-two. Jack is nearly sixteen. Leanne has boyfriends. Paula hasn’t met any of them. Jack, she doesn’t know about. He tells her nothing. He’s been taller than her since he was twelve. She checks his clothes for girl-smells but all she can smell is Jack.
He’s still her baby.
It’s not a long walk from the station. It just feels that way tonight. God, she’s tired. She’s been tired all day. Tired and dark.
This place has changed.
She’s not interested tonight. She just wants to get home. The ache is in her ankles. The ground is hard. Every footstep cracks her.
Paula Spencer. That’s who she is.
She wants a drink.
The house is empty.
She can feel it before she shuts the door behind her.
Bad.
She needs the company. She needs distraction. They’ve left the lights on, and the telly. But she knows. She can feel it. The door is louder. Her bag drops like a brick. There’s no one in.
Get used to it, she tells herself.
She’s finished. That’s how it often feels. She never looked forward to it. The freedom. The time. She doesn’t want it.
She isn’t hungry. She never really is.
She stands in front of the telly. Her coat is half off. It’s one of those house programmes. She usually likes them. But not tonight. A couple looking around their new kitchen. They’re delighted, opening all the presses.
Fuck them.
She turns away. But stops. Their fridge, on the telly. It’s the same as Paula’s. Mrs Happy opens it. And closes it. Smiling. Paula had hers before them. A present from Nicola. The fridge. And the telly. Both presents.
Nicola is her eldest.
Paula goes into the kitchen. The fridge is there.
–You were on the telly, she says.
She feels stupid. Talking to the fridge. She hated that film, Shirley Valentine, when Shirley talked to the wall. Hello, wall. She fuckin’ hated it. It got better, the film, but that bit killed it for her. At her worst, her lowest, Paula never spoke to a wall or anything else that wasn’t human. And now she’s talking to the fridge. Sober, hard-working, reliable — she’s all these things these days, and she’s talking to the fridge.
It’s a good fridge, though. It takes up half the kitchen. It’s one of those big silver, two-door jobs. Ridiculous. Twenty years too late. She opens it the way film stars open the curtains. Daylight! Ta-dah! Empty. What was Nicola thinking of? The stupid bitch. How to make a poor woman feel poorer. Buy her a big fridge. Fill that, loser. The stupid bitch. What was she thinking?
But that’s not fair. She knows it’s not. Nicola meant well; she always does. All the presents. She’s showing off a bit. But that’s fine with Paula. She’s proud to have a daughter who can fling a bit of money around. The pride takes care of the humiliation, every time. Kills it stone dead.
She’s not hungry. But she’d like something to eat. Something nice. It shocked her, a while back — not long ago. She was in Carmel, her sister’s house. Chatting, just the pair of them that afternoon. Denise, her other sister, was away somewhere, doing something — she can’t remember. And Carmel took one of those Tesco prawn things out of her own big fridge and put it between them on the table. Paula took up a prawn and put it into her mouth — and tasted it.
–Lovely, she said.
–Yeah, said Carmel. –They’re great.
Paula hadn’t explained it to her. The fact that she was tasting, really tasting something for the first time in — she didn’t know how long. Years. She’d liked it. The feeling. And she’d liked the prawns. And other things she’s eaten since. Tayto, cheese and onion. Coffee. Some tomatoes. Chicken skin. Smarties.She’s tasted them all.
But the fridge is fuckin’ empty. She picks up the milk carton. She weighs it. Enough for the morning. She checks the date. It’s grand; two days to go.
There’s a carrot at the bottom of the fridge. She bends down — she likes raw carrots. Another new taste. But this one is old, and soft. She should bring it to the bin. She lets it drop back into the fridge. There’s a jar of mayonnaise in there as well. Half empty. A bit yellow. Left over from last summer. There’s a bit of red cheese, and a tub of Dairygold.
There’s a packet of waffles in the freezer. There’s two left in the packet — Jack’s breakfast. There’s something else in the back of the freezer, covered in ice, hidden. Stuck there. The package is red — she can see that much. But she doesn’t know what it is. She’d have to hack at it with a knife or something. She couldn’t be bothered. Anyway, if it was worth eating it wouldn’t be there.
What People are Saying About This
"An extraordinary story about an ordinary life."
-People
"Brilliant . . . And Paula, as she patches a self together from remnants, emerges as an inspiring heroine."
-The New Yorker
"Beautifully nuanced and sweetly populist."
-USA Today
"A tale of ultimate personal struggle, and told superbly."
-The Wall Street Journal
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
Looking for Paula
The first time Paula Spencer’s teenage son, Jack, shows her what an Internet search engine does, she impulsively suggests he type in her name. The search turns up a parenting expert, and the irony is not lost on Paula, who has given up drinking but is haunted by the knowledge of her own troubled history as a parent.
Paula Spencer is the protagonist of an earlier novel by Roddy Doyle, The Woman Who Walked into Doors. But much has happened since then, and in Doyle’s new novel, he returns to her life and answers the question: Who is Paula Spencer now? In her newly sober state, she struggles through every day. She is a mother and a sister, and knows she hasn’t been very good at either. She works as a cleaning woman for Dublin households and offices, as she has for years, but these days she might be the only white woman on a cleaning crew of “foreigners.” She is a widow who has not been with a man in more than a decade. And despite her newfound sobriety, those closest to her cannot help but remind her that she is an “alco,” someone to be watched with suspicion.
Her family also seems to know much more about the world than she does. Paula comes to realize that Ireland looks different to her now. It is not entirely unfamiliar, but the economic boom and immigration mean the landscape and people are changing, as are the lives of many of her fellow Irish men and women. In this world that she views by turns with skepticism and wonder, where does she fit? Has the world passed her by without her noticing? Has she herself changed? In the course of the novel she ponders all this, and she also thinks back on her own, smaller world of fear and abuse at the hands of her husband. Wondering who she has become, Paula constantly catches herself, revises her thoughts, undercuts her softer feelings. Expressing affection for and annoyance with someone—or herself—in almost the same breath, she might come off as mercurial, but in truth she is as complicated as any of us, and as real, which is what makes her such an affecting character. Doyle doesn’t pin her down, he doesn’t define her once and for all, and he doesn’t allow us to do so either.
When Paula tells Joe, a man she has met at the bottle return with whom she begins to strike up a friendship, that she is an alcoholic, she does so almost naturally, in the course of a conversation in a public place. By this time she knows that being an alcoholic is an important fact about her, but it is not everything. John Paul, the son who has long seemed a stranger to her, is finally able to talk to her in a way that lets her know he sees her clearly, sees what she has to do every day to keep going. Joe, who is new in her life, has already seen much more in her, has seen her as a woman he wants to know, and perhaps, as she opens herself up to him, she begins to see it too.
The Evolution of Paula Spencer
Irish audiences first encountered Paula Spencer in the four-part television drama Family, scripted by Roddy Doyle for the BBC. This unflinching depiction of how abuse and alcoholism affect one particular Irish working-class family was acclaimed as compelling and truthful, but many viewers were uncomfortable and even angry with its subject matter. Doyle, undaunted, went on to write his 1996 novel, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, in Paula’s voice. The novel has since been turned into an opera and a stage play (the latter by Doyle), and it speaks to the strength and depth of Doyle’s creation that Paula has had so many incarnations, especially dramatic ones. She has grown beyond the page because she lives so fully on it. Francine Prose, in reviewing The Woman Who Walked into Doors for the Los Angeles Times, compared Paula to another great Irish woman of literature, Joyce’s Molly Bloom, noting that Paula is “at once ordinary and mythical, lyrical and gritty, down to earth and so much larger than life that her personality keeps spilling over the boundary between the spiritual and the carnal.”
The previous novel was narrated by Paula herself, who looks back over the years of her life with her husband, Charlo. By contrast, in Paula Spencer, Doyle employs a third-person present-tense narration, allowing something of a documentary-style effect, cutting from scene to scene, though always rich with detail and with Paula’s own pointed observations. The sentences are often brief, often fragmented, so while we are ostensibly outside of Paula, we are nonetheless immersed in the world as she experiences it. Perhaps this is what makes her seem more human, though no less vibrant or extraordinary. She clings to routine, keeps herself going: working, coming home, making her lists, facing what must be faced, finding small flashes of joy. By the end of the novel, which covers a little more than a year, some things have changed for Paula and some things have not. It is almost as though we were revisiting her at a random section of her life, but this is only because, as we all do, Paula lives the everyday moments that make up life. In those moments she is also filled with feeling—the ache to be a good mother, the craving for the touch of a man, the elation of hearing new music. And by the end it’s clear that Paula has found something in the world and in herself that she hasn’t felt in a long time: the thrill of possibility.
ABOUT RODDY DOYLE
Roddy Doyle is an internationally bestselling writer. His first three novels—The Commitments, The Snapper, and the 1991 Booker Prize finalist The Van—are known as The Barrytown Trilogy. He is also the author of the novels Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993 Booker Prize winner), The Woman Who Walked into Doors, and A Star Called Henry, and a non-fiction book about his parents, Rory & Ita. Doyle has also written for the stage and the screen: the plays Brownbread, War, Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner, and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors; the film adaptations of The Commitments )as co-writer), The Snapper, and The Van; When Brendan Met Trudy (an original screenplay); the four-part television series Family for the BBC; and the television play Hell for Leather. Roddy Doyle has also written the children's books The Giggler Treatment,Rover Saves Christmas, and The Meanwhile Adventures and contributed to a variety of publications including The New Yorker magazine and several anthologies. He lives in Dublin.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Foreword
1. a) ‘She copes. A lot of the time. Most of the time. She copes. And sometimes she doesn’t. Cope. At all.’ (p.1). Paula is a survivor. Do think the fact that sometimes she is ok and other times she isn’t makes her a more believable survivor than someone who is shown to be completely strong? Where else in the novel does her need to survive shine through?
b) Reviewing The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Mary Gordon wrote: 'It is the triumph of this novel that Mr Doyle - entirely without condescension - shows the inner life of this battered house-cleaner to be the same stuff as that of the heroes of the great novels of Europe.'
Do you think that Paula is a heroine for our times?
2. The book is set in the ‘New Dublin’ where there are a lot of new emigrants are becoming part of the community. How well does Roddy Doyle portray this new world? What do you think of Paula’s reaction to the changes around her?
3. ‘Her mother’s an addict too. John Paul told her that, one of the first times they met. It’s a hard thing to imagine, a granny who’s a heroin addict. But John Paul got there before Paula; it was hard to imagine a granny who’s an alcoholic. He wasn’t being vicious. She even smiled.’ (p.117)
4. How do the roles of Paula’s life – grandmother, mother, widow, alcoholic, cleaner – conflict with one another? Is she able to fulfill any of these in the book?
a) Do you think that Paula’s own addiction has lead to her children’s addiction to heroin and alcohol?
b) Why are some of the children affected by the past and the othersaren’t?
5. Paula is proud to be able to purchase a computer for Jack. Why does consumerism equal achievement for Paula? Is it a way to show that she is getting away from the poverty – emotionally and monetary – of the past?
6. In an interview about The Woman who Walked into Doors Roddy Doyle said ‘everyone has a soundtrack to their lives.’ How important is the music in Paula Spencer?
7. How does the style of the narrative affect the way you read the book? Do you feel that you are in Paula’s head?
8. ‘[Paula]’s on Temple Street when she hears and feels the mobile. A text. She opens it. 1 tit. Hpy Brthdy. She laughs. She won’t delete that one. She can’t wait to see Carmel now.’ (p.277)
In this moment when Paula’s sister is recovering from her mastectomy there is humor. Throughout the book there are moments of sadness which are laced with laughter. How do you think this works in the book? Do you think this a realistic portrayal of life?