This is a truly beautiful book. Its language is rich and its premise is a reader’s dream of what literature should do at its best: connect, converse and contain all that haunts us when contemplating our human predicament.

I don’t know whether Michael Cunningham set out to write this novel in order to pay tribute to Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” or if that book just happened to serve as the perfect vehicle for his own reflections on Love, Life and Death. Whatever the case, the result is a masterful narration that uses Mrs. Dalloway's plot and character as the link between three women, Virginia Woolf included, who share the same fears and yearn for more meaningful lives although they live in different times and places.
Cunningham improvises on Woolf’s theme of Time, how it unrelentingly flows and how it mercifully seems to stop sometimes, to offer us those precious, wholesome moments that keep us carrying on; or not…

I think the book is also a tribute to the reading experience itself; how readers find themselves containing and contained in certain authors and fictional characters. How reading suspends us in time, has us occupying a space that is neither here nor there, a unique time-bubble that is common secret among those eager to live in it every once in a while. How authors and readers find themselves engaged in a conversation that transcends time and place.

It helps but is not necessary to have read the original. This book stands on its own but the pleasure is enhanced if one can spot the references to the source material and the way Cunningham manages to weave them into his novel.
I underlined so many dazzling sentences. I put exclamation marks next to so many passages, along with little arrows to help remind me exactly what was worth pointing out. I scribbled words such as ‘self-detachment’, ‘remorse’, ‘continuity’, ‘consolation’, ‘transcendence’, planning to elaborate on them in this review. In the end the author perfectly summed it up himself in this paragraph ... the way a painter might brush a final line of color onto a painting and save it from incoherence:

Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep – it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

What more could I possibly add except for my admiration?

"La più grande felicità possibile..."
Un giorno. Tre donne. Lo leggo nell'ultimo giorno di giugno, una casualità. Virginia, fragile, sensibile, eterea, claustrofobica. La sua unica forza è nelle parole, catturate a fatica nella sua mente instabile e incerta. Non dà scampo per quel fluttuare con le tasche piene di sassi sull'acqua, come la Ofelia di Everett Millais, il cappotto che si gonfia, i piedi che affondano lenti. Clarissa, la simpatica signora Dalloway, una donna di mezza età, che della sua banale normalità di vita fa il fulcro della sua esistenza e non se ne cura. Guarda la bellezza del mondo, trova ancora bellezza nel mondo attorno a tutto quello che le grida morte e sorride. Un amore non vissuto e inseguito per tutta la vita, che si trasforma in un accudimento incessante e materno al suo caro Richard. Laura, la madre felice e infelice, la moglie insoddisfatta, che legge Virginia e che pensa alla morte con desiderio, quasi con liberazione. Che cosa hanno in comune queste donne? Le ore. Quelle trascorse, quelle ancora da trascorrere, meravigliose per la loro possibilità, per la capacità di essere riempite di tutto e di nulla, per le mille strade che schiudono davanti ai loro ( e ai nostri) occhi e che promettono tutto e niente: "Ecco: ora è qui. Ora se ne va. La pagina sta per essere girata". " Cerchi di conservare questo momento, provi ad abitarlo, provi ad amarlo perché è tuo". Fin dalle prime battute la scrittura è attenta, ben calibrata, si sente una ricerca della parola che scivola nell'immagine che è sublime: l'irregolarità della sponda di un argine che l'acqua riempie; i bombardieri che ronzano e non si vedono, la scelta della pietra fatale, i pescatori, il profumo erboso reso più acuto dalla resina dei pini; le foglie che luccicano su un albero in una mattina di New York sfavillante; il diavolo come una pinna che rompe la superficie delle onde scure; un appartamento come una nave affondata in cui si fluttua; un uccello morto come un guanto perso per terra. Ma la possibilità è vita o morte. Che cos'è l'ultima cosa che vede Virginia? Che cosa l'ultima cosa che sente attraverso il suo corpo? Sente l'amore per Leonard, unica terra su cui riposare. E le parole che lascia per lui sono una dichiarazione d'amore come ne ho lette poche nella vita: "Mi hai dato la più grande felicità possibile, sei stato in ogni senso tutto quanto potevi essere...ti devo tutta la felicità della mia vita...tutto mi ha abbandonato tranne la certezza della tua bontà, non credo che due persone avrebbero potuto essere più felici di quanto siamo stati noi..." Leonard non chiede quello che lei non può dare, accoglie e basta. "Se tu mi amassi farei qualunque cosa". No, non è vero. Se tu mi amassi io non avrei bisogno di dimostrarti l'amore che provo. Tu lo sapresti, e tutto il resto sarebbe inutile. ..

Good read! very intriguing..deals with three women that are intertwine and connected by different time period through a simple book....well written...(paperback!)

Book Circle Reads 20

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, who is recognized as "one of our very best writers" (Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times), draw inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters who are struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair.

The novel opens with an evocation of Woolf's last days before her suicide in 1941, and moves to the stories of two modern American women who are trying to make rewarding lives for themselves in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.

Clarissa Vaughan is a book editor who lives in present-day Greenwich Village; when we meet her, she is buying flowers to display at a party for her friend Richard, and ailing poet who has just won a major literary prize. Laura Brown is a housewife in postwar California who is bringing up her only son and looking for her true life outside of her stifling marriage.

With rare ease and assurance, Cunningham makes the two women's lives converge with Virginia Woolf's in an unexpected and heartbreaking way during the party for Richard. As the novel jump-cuts through the twentieth century, every line resonates with Cunningham's clear, strong, surprising lyrical contemporary voice.

Passionate, profound and deeply moving, The Hours is Michael Cunningham's most remarkable achievement to date.

My Review: Three women mirror the facets of the life of Clarissa Dalloway, heroine of the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. One life is Mrs. Woolf herself, shown in the depths of despair as she convalesces from one of her crippling bouts with depression in the suburban aridity of Richmond while pining for life in London's Bloomsbury, writing her novel of the exquisite nature of the quotidian. Another is the life of Mrs. Laura Brown, dying a million deaths every day in suburban Los Angeles, raising a son and pregnant again by a good man she doesn't love, as she reads Mrs. Dalloway and ponders escape. Lastly the life of Clarissa Vaughn, whose long unrequited love for Richard Brown, her gay poet/novelist friend, has led her to care for him tenderly in his final years as an AIDS patient. He long ago nicknamed her “Mrs. Dalloway,” both for her first name and for her exquisitely self-abnegating strength.

Over the course of one day in the life of each woman, everything she knows and feels about her life is sharply refocused; it is made clear to each that, to escape the trap she is in, she must accept change or die in the trap. The ending of the book brings all three strands to their inevitable conclusions, with surprising overlaps.
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I first read this when it came out in 1998. I fell in love instantly, as I had with Mrs. Dalloway at a slightly earlier date. I loved the imaginative structure of interwoven lives, commenting on each other and riffing off the events in each world, echoing some facet in every case the events in the iconic novel Mrs. Dalloway.

I can't give it five stars because, in the end, I wondered a bit if the clever-clever hadn't gotten in the way of the emotional core of the book, which I saw as the gritty determination of the women to live on their own terms and in their own lives not dependent on convention. In making the book conform to this ideal, I felt that some plot strands weren't honestly dealt with but rather forced into a shape required by the author's plans.

That cavil aside, the book is beautifully written and wonderfully interestingly conceived. I'd recommend it heartily, and suggest reading it in conjunction with the movie.

I can only hope, after reading this novel, that I will have the pleasure someday of meeting the author, Michael Cunningham. This is what I'd like to say to him: Here, in this novel, you have honored the craft of writing. Here is the place where talent, intelligence and imagination have collided. Here you have proven that you do not need to lower the bar to meet the mainstream and you have, instead, challenged all of us to raise it higher.

This is an exceptional read, a Pulitzer well-deserved. A must-read for anyone who has the heart, the brain, the nerve.

7.0/10

I'm having a difficult time rating this book because I loved the movie far too much. The movie had just the right amount of nuance and subtlety and inspiration, writ large, that acts as a revelation to the mind and heart. The book: not so much.

For most of the novel, I felt like I was standing inside a huge echo chamber attendant with visual aspects that kept flashing at me, à la Clockwork Orange. Virginia Woolf was more than writ large -- she was the godhead from which everything flowed. After a while, it became annoying, and in degrees, downright disturbing. Does this man not have a thought of his own that does not flow from Virginia Woolf?

As the intent was to pay homage to Woolf, it occurred to me that this adoration had become its own curse: the real sentiment of what he is trying to say gets lost, often, in the Voice of The Creator. Since she did it so much better than he, I began to wonder what was the point of the entire exercise. Oh, how Virginia would have hated this, I thought, she who hated mirrors.

On the other hand, if the intent of this novel was to bring new readers to Woolf, Cunningham has done his job well. That echo chamber that I find so disturbing is also a useful tool for whispering into the ear of neophytes, "Pssst, woolf, woolf, woolves ..." I like that so many have turned to Woolf because of this novel and found her, for the first time, accessible, and even likable.

Cunningham is a good enough writer that it is an easy read; on a few occasions, he is positively inspired. On the whole however, I wasn't so taken with his style that I would seek him out again. I think he's a good enough writer that had a brilliant notion of what would sell, and what people were hungry for at the time of his writing this. How can you ever go wrong when Virginia Woolf is your source?

Някои от книгите срещаме твърде късно в живота си, толкова късно, че вече е казано всичко, което може да се каже за тях. Твърде късно, наистина, и същевременно винаги навреме.

Такъв пример за мен е именно романът "Часовете" на Майкъл Кънингам. Признавам си, че първо гледах филма, на който попаднах случайно една нощ в началото на лятото, когато, без дори да осъзнавам, имах силна нужда от точно подобна история... нещо, което да ми помогне да избера живота отново за хиляден път. Така силно ме впечатли, че започнах да го гледам всяка следваща нощ, наслаждавайки се на прекрасната актьорска игра на Мерил Стрийп (много любима моя актриса заради ролята ѝ в "Дяволът носи Прада" и наистина не подозирах, че ще намеря друга нейна по-зашеметяваща, но като Клариса Вон е... нямам думи). И Никол Кидман, която не харесвам особено много, също е невероятна Вирджиния Улф.

Пробвал съм да чета "Мисис Далауей" преди години, но някак си не успях. Може би не е било правилното време. Благодарение на Кънингам, определено ще пробвам отново. А относно творчеството му - този човек пише просто божествено и със сигурност ще прочета и останалите му книги.

"Даваме приеми, правим тържества, напускаме семействата си, за да живеем сам-сами в Канада, мъчим се да пишем книги, които обаче не променят света, независимо от нашия талант, неспирни усилия и големи надежди. Живеем живота си, занимаваме се - всеки с нещо, - после заспиваме. Всичко е толкова просто и обикновено. Някои скачат от прозорците или влизат да се удавят, или взимат хапчета; повечето умират случайно, при нещастни случаи, а още повече - голямото мнозинство, биват бавно поглъщани от някоя болест или, ако са късметлии, от самото време. Едно е само утешението: отделен час тук или там, когато, противно на всякакви зли сили и очаквания, животът ни като че се разтваря и ни дава всичко, за което някога сме мечтали, макар че всички освен децата (а може би дори и те) знаят, че тези часове ще бъдат неизменно последвани от други, мрачни и много по-трудни. Въпреки това ние обожаваме града, утрото; надяваме се на нещо повече.
Един Бог знае защо го правим."

Не съм сигурен, че мога да кажа, че е най-любимата ми книга, но обожавам този прочет поради куп причини, заради самите обстоятелства, заради... ❤️

"Always the love. Always the hours."

П. П. Едва ли на някой му е направило впечатление, но когато завърших романа, писах тук, че ще си отварям блог, но истината е, че в момента не разполагам с времето и много съжалявам, ако все пак някой, който редовно чете книжните ми впечатления (не вярвам да има, lol), е останал подведен.

4.5 stars

n  

Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed?

n
Cunningham has forged a masterful novel which melds ideas of creativity, failure, love, suicide, depression and gender, and has done so in a manner that manages to be profoundly moving in just a little over 200 pages. It’s not that the narrative feels compressed, it’s that the text expands beautifully around an array of images and motifs that accrue meaning each time they appear and reappear: yellow roses, a kiss, water, shoes… This fine use of intertexts is exactly what I was hoping – but failed - to get from Ali Smith’s Seasons quartet: Smith inserts traces that don’t add up to anything; Cunningham enables his connections to speak to each other and to us: they carry the message of the text beyond the plot surface.

The engagement with Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is creative and penetrating: in the three narratives nestled here, Virginia Woolf is wrestling with what she wants her book, originally called ‘The Hours’, to be; Clarissa, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway, in late C20th New York experiences much that Woolf’s own character does in that single day that encompasses both love and death; and Laura Brown in 1950s America is struggling to find the time to read ‘Mrs Dalloway’ amidst her humdrum domesticity – while also pulling the whole book together beautifully by the end.

While, strictly speaking, it’s possible to read this without knowing ‘Mrs Dalloway’ (it’s clever that Laura is reading the book so that pertinent quotations can be inserted within this text), there are so many pleasures to be found in tracing connections and marvelling at how deftly Cunningham has both reproduced key moments and given them a modern contemporaneity Septimus Smith, for example, suffering from ‘shell shock’ in the original, becomes a man dying from HIV/AIDS.

Ultimately, this is a book about the courage it might take to live, to love or to create a work of art – where the payback is those few, singular moments that illuminate and incandesce amidst the everyday, the mundane, the painful and the terrifying of ‘the hours’ of existence.

I'm not entirely sure why I liked this novel as much as I did - plot-wise it's quite hard to sum up any more than what is already given in the blurb.

Cunningham portrays a day of the live in three very different but very connected women: Clarissa Vaughan, a middle-aged woman living in New York in the 1990s; Laura Brown, a young house-wife in 1940s Los Angeles; and Virginia Woolf herself in 1920s London, or thereabouts. Virginia Woolf has just begun writing Mrs Dalloway, Laura Brown is trying to find time in between her household-duties to read Mrs Dalloway, and Clarissa is nick-named Mrs Dalloway by a close friend and ex-lover who is dying of AIDS.

Cunningham manages to write from a woman's perspective incredibly well, and the fact that he managed to juggle three very different women in three very different situations as beautifully and honestly as he did is to be commended. The novel explores various themes including loneliness, the role of women in society and particularly in relation to men, and of course the ever-present thought (and sometimes lure) of the grave.

I read Mrs Dalloway a couple of years ago, and although I wasn't a big fan of the stream of consciousness style of this classic, I liked how the writing was at times mirrored in this book, particularly in parts of Clarissa Vaughan's narrative. The beginning of her day very much mirrored Clarissa Dalloway's morning, and I appreciated the link between the two texts there. In terms of my favourite perspective, I have to give it to Laura Brown - I felt her frustration at her housewife-life and the role she had to play with her needy son and husband. Her thought process was suffocating at times, and I really felt for her, even if at times her thoughts could be somewhat selfish. As for Virginia Woolf, although of course her storyline was fictionalised, I still felt like I was getting in the real author's head at times, and I loved the insight into her relationship with her sister Vanessa (which was researched I believe through their letters and diaries).

I'd recommend this to everyone, whether you're a fan of Mrs Dalloway or not. It's a quick easy read, but quite poignant in its own way.

Gorgeous and teeming with life and joy, despite the heavy topics it takes on
A beautiful book which I first read 12 years ago. It captures one day in the live of three women, Laura Brown, housewife in the 50s, Virginia Woolf and Clarissa “Dalloway” Vaughan in modern day New York.

Clarissa her storyline closely but modernly, and free of 1920s social norms, mirrors Mrs. Dalloway of Virginia Woolf, culminating in a suicide.
Mrs Brown seems to be contemplating the same act to escape her married life while finally Virginia Woolf tries desperately to return to “living”, which she equates to London in all its totality, even though it might be, and will be as we already see in the prologue, her undoing.

Every storyline is lovingly portrayed with meticulous detail and very precise language, capturing everyday feelings that at the sametime overwhelm the characters. The book is about missed chances, not being able to every express oneself fully, getting old and, very much, life itself.
I also loved figuring out the connections between the storylines. After twelve years I still thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed this book, especially reading it soon after Mrs Dalloway of Virginia Woolf.

"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep--it's as simple and ordinary as that."

Sigh. Swoon. No other book so perfectly captures the restlessness / misgivings / dissatisfaction of characters who should be content living what appear to be perfect lives, and I am (still) in love. Very Little Children, but more lyrical. I should have fallen head over heels in love on the first reading (I mean I did, with reservations) but I had the movie adaptation, which so closely mirrors the book, still playing in my head. Even now I struggle not to picture those actors as these characters, and I wish this wasn't so. I want to imagine Virginia Woolf as Virginia Woolf, not Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, even if Julianne Moore makes for a perfect Laura Brown, who is my favorite of the three women in this book, by the way. But how can a character played by Meryl Streep muse about having possibly sighted Meryl Streep? Ugh. (Fine, it might have been Vanessa Redgrave [unlikely] or possibly [probably not] Susan Sarandon.)

[first review]

Here I go again, rebel that I am, loving a derivative work (à la Wide Sargasso Sea) without having read the original. Am I the only one who relished the A Single Man feeling of Laura Brown's story? Perhaps the comparison is a bit too obvious--suburban disillusionment in mid-century Los Angeles, following a single character through a single day etc. There even a scene on the LA freeways! As a whole the book reminded me of three intercut Alice Munro short stories (but more lyrical!), and I fell absolutely in love with it. The movie put me off reading it for a long time, but after coming across it in a Little Free Library (I actually do have a copy of it somewhere), I had to give it a chance. How glad I am that I did. I'd forgotten that I've read Michael Cunningham's A Wild Swan: And Other Tales, so this isn't technically my first book by him, but what an introduction!

”We throw our parties; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep--it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’ve very fortunate, by time itself.”

It’s about the hours right? Those few precious hours over a lifetime when we feel we have a chance to do something special, to prove that we can do something that will forever immortalize us as someone exceptional.

It was Charlotte who pressed this book upon me. We were at a party conducted by a Mrs. Clarissa Galloway.

“I hear you are on a reading binge.” She’d leaned in close, as she had a tendency to do with me. Her lips mere millimeters away from my ear. It made me shiver somewhere in the core of me.

When I was between assignments, which was all too frequent, I would read book after book; usually I would be in the middle of at least three at any one time. I was getting about four hours of sleep a night which right now was making me a cheap drunk. One martini was going to be more than enough.

“The Hours by Michael Cunningham, didn’t they make a film out of it with Kidman?”

She nodded. She leaned in close again. I often wondered if she knew what she did to me. “The book won a Pulitzer Prize. Catherine told me you just finished reading Mrs. Dalloway. This is a terrific follow-up.“

The sisters.

You couldn’t really be involved with one without being involved with the other. Catherine, my girlfriend, was writing a novel. It was brilliant in fact, but now was somewhat weighed down with its own brilliance. She was happy with the beginning and the ending, but the middle was not living up to the standards of the rest. Charlotte designed book covers for publishing companies. She had a gift for it, but frequently had to endure someone further up the chain asking for modifications, her masterpieces often becoming something more commercially appealing and soulless. When I was doing research on Virginia Woolf, before reading Mrs. Dalloway, I couldn’t help thinking of Catherine as Virginia and Charlotte as Vanessa.

”Vanessa laughs. Vanessa is firm of face, her skin a brilliant, scalded pink. Although she is three years older, she looks younger than Virginia, and both of them know it. If Virginia has the austere, parched beauty of a Giotto fresco, Vanessa is more like a figure sculpted in rosy marble by a skilled but minor artist of the late Baroque. She is distinctly earthly and even decorative figure, all billows and scrolls….”

As usual, I wasn’t really sure why I was at this party. I thought with remorse of the lost pages of reading the party had already cost me. I could see the books strategically scattered around the room of the flat. A book by each of my favorite reading places. This party was bad for me, and if it was not good for me, it had to be an absolute torture for Catherine.

I looked past Charlotte’s large, attentive eyes and could see that Catherine was pale. Her complexion was always pale, but there were various shades of pale that would tell me exactly what was going on with her. She closed her eyes and took too long to open them. I could tell it was time to go.

I leaned in and kissed Charlotte’s ear, raising the stakes, and then muttered in the sea shell of her ear that I was going to take Catherine home. Charlotte always smelled so good, but I was never able to quite identify the scent, something old, something new. Somehow it would be breaking the rules of the game to ask her. I walked over to Catherine and put my arm around her and kissed her on the side of her mouth. She looked at me with surprise. I could see the slender flutes of her nose flutter as she took me in. Could it be that she could sense her sister’s scent even among the mingling fragrances of flowers that filled Mrs. Galloway’s party?

She put her slender, fluted fingers on my shoulder. “I can feel one coming on.”

“I’m here to take you home.”

”She can feel the headache creeping up the back of her neck. She stiffens. No, it’s the memory of the headache, it’s her fear of the headache, both of them so vivid as to be at least briefly indistinguishable from the onset of the headache itself.”

I went to see Robert the next day. I’d read most of The Hours last night. Charlotte had been right. It was the perfect followup to Mrs. Dalloway. Robert had been my friend almost my entire life or at least for the segment of my life that I still wished to claim. He’d had a good career on the stage, had mother issues of course, and had always been unapologetically gay. The young nurse from Hospice was taking a vial of blood from him when I arrived. There was something so intimate about blood letting. I averted my eyes as if I’d just caught her furtively giving him a hand job.

“I’m so weak. This is it, my friend.” His voice, the voice that had boomed out to theaters full of people, had been reduced to a whisper.

I patted his hand. He weakly grasped it. I left my fingers there surrounded by the parchment of his hand. “You’ve rallied before.” I’d meant to put exuberance into that sentence, but somehow it all went wrong. My voice cracked and tears sprang to my eyes.

“Oh, come on now. Tears now? You should have wept with joy when I looked like a young Marlon Brando. Not now, not over this decrepit body. If you were a true friend, you’d pick me up and hurl me out that window.”

I thought of Septimus from Mrs. Dalloway and Richard from The Hours. It was almost too much.

“Don’t say that.” My voice was still shaking. I freed my hand from his grasp to wipe my eyes. When I put my hand back on the bed, his hand was gone.

“Do you think six floors would be enough to kill me? God, what a tragedy if it only breaks my bones, and leaves me somehow alive with fresh sources of pain. I was thinking about it the other day. I wouldn’t want to fall on the concrete. I want to land on a car. I want to explode through the top like they show in the movies. You own a car, don’t you? Couldn’t you park it beneath my window?”

“You are hurting me, Robert.”

He sighed. Closing those magnificent blue eyes that had mesmerized women and men in equal numbers, “That is the last thing that I want to do to you, my friend.”

When I got back to the flat, they must not have heard me. Catherine was leaning over Charlotte. ”Virginia leaned forward and kisses Vanessa on the mouth. It is an innocent kiss, innocent enough, but just now,...it feels like the most delicious and forbidden of pleasures. Vanessa returns the kiss.” I wanted to wrap my arms around both of them and nudge them across the room to the bed. I wondered if Leonard Woolf had ever had such desires? They might have willingly went, but then what? By trying to hold them closer, I’d only lose them both.

I cleared my throat and hung up my jacket. When I turned around, they were both looking at me with clear, intelligent eyes. Two sisters, so different, but so much alike as to be indistinguishable when standing in the same space.

It was hard not to think about the big stone. ”She selects one roughly the size and shape of a pig’s skull. The one that took her down to the depths of the river. The one that would not let her escape the embrace of the water even if her natural desire for self-preservation had kicked in. The stone was too real to be denied.

Catherine had read Mrs. Dalloway and was now reading The Hours. She had needed a break from her own writing anyway. Reading sometimes gave her a fresh source of inspiration. I wasn’t sure about her reading either book, but both together could enhance her already acute suicidal tendencies. I’d seen her more than once raking a butter knife across her wrists as if testing how it would feel. I’d had the gas oven taken out and replaced it with an electric one.

I read her diary.

She wasn’t particularly careful with it. She left it out all the time, rarely tucking it back under the mattress on our bed. I don’t know if she trusted me not to read it or she, being a writer, always wanted an audience for her writing. ”Everything she sees feels as if it’s pinned to the day the way etherized butterflies are pinned to the board.” She was obviously feeling trapped. Like Leonard Woolf decided to do with Virginia, I arranged to take Catherine to the country for a month. She was being overstimulated in the city.

Robert threw himself out the window.

He asked the nurse to open the window to give him some air. The stubborn bastard crawled across the floor, pulled himself up the wall, and threw himself out the window. Though he would have preferred a Rolls Royce, he landed on a Mercedes.

Six floors, as it turned out, was enough.

Two days after we reached the country Catherine disappeared. As I walked the river, along with every other able body in the county, I kept thinking about a stone the size of a pig’s skull.

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