Other Women

Lisa Alther’s Other Women is a novel about therapy, desire, identity, feminism, marriage, sex, friendship and the perilous business of trying to become an honest human being while surrounded by other honest human beings doing it badly. At the centre is a woman in analysis, which in fiction means the furniture may look ordinary but the emotional upholstery is already coming apart.

This is Alther territory: sharp, comic, frank, intelligent and very much alive to the absurdity of modern self-examination. The novel moves through the lives, relationships and inner weather of women trying to understand themselves after the old scripts have become useless and the new scripts have not yet been printed clearly. Husbands, lovers, therapists, friends, rivals, bodies, ambitions and histories all press in, each offering a different way to be dissatisfied.

The title, Other Women, does what a good title should: it sounds simple and then quietly opens several trapdoors. Other women as rivals, friends, patients, mirrors, temptations, threats, examples, fantasies, versions of the self not chosen or not yet admitted. Every woman in the book seems to be, for someone else, an explanation, a warning, a possibility or an accusation. It is a crowded business, being oneself.

There is a fine irony in therapy as a setting. One goes in hoping to become clearer and often begins by becoming much more complicated. Questions multiply. Childhood returns with luggage. Desire starts giving evidence. The past refuses to remain past. A simple sentence such as “I’m fine” suddenly requires excavation permits. Alther understands the comedy of this without denying the seriousness. The search for liberation can involve breakthroughs, yes, but also vanity, confusion, erotic misjudgement and saying things aloud that perhaps had been behaving better when left in the dark.

This is a novel from the post-60s, post-women’s-liberation emotional battlefield, where freedom has arrived but not necessarily instructions. Women are allowed to want more, which is excellent, except “more” is a famously unruly category. Love, independence, sex, work, motherhood, intellect, honesty and selfhood all begin making claims. The result is messy, funny, painful and recognisably human, which is inconvenient for anyone hoping ideology would tidy up the living room.

For readers of feminist fiction, literary comedy, 1980s women’s writing, novels of therapy and self-discovery, or books where the emotional truth arrives wearing slightly unsuitable shoes, Other Women is smart shelf material. It is not cosy, not coy, and not especially interested in pretending grown-up life improves merely because people have acquired vocabulary for it.

As New copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. Almost indecently tidy for a novel about inner disorder, intimate confusion and the exhausting democratic process of becoming oneself. A clean Penguin copy, ready to sit on the shelf looking composed while everyone inside it quietly unravels.

Keep browsing: See more Womens books Other books by Lisa Alther