From a blog post I wrote in 2005:

If you've read The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd's first novel, you probably have high expectations for her latest work, The Mermaid Chair. Bees was beautifully written and made you care about the characters so much that you were sorry to have to leave them at the end of the story. I hope she writes a sequel.

Mermaid Chair has some of the same elements as Bees: quirky characters, long held secrets, romance and long time friendships. But, I didn't feel the love so much. It was an interesting enough story but I never connected to the main character, a woman in her 40s who's feeling distanced from her marriage/husband and who has to return to her hometown to care for her crazy/ill/somewhat estranged Mother. The hometown is actually an island off of South Carolina and home to a Monastery. Our heroine becomes romantically involved with one of the monks while uncovering secrets about her family.

Yeah, I didn't care so much about how it turned out. If you haven't read The Secret Life of Bees, I recommend it highly. As to The Mermaid Chair, it would make for a good airplane book but I wouldn't suggest you go out of your way to read it.

I loved it. I just loved it. Everything about it. I don't read many books more than once. But I could read this one a few times more. I checked it out from the library on CD and the hard back book. The narrator is very, very good. Circumstances prevented me from having much time to sit and read, but I could listen to the book when I walked or in the car and finish it after I started the hard copy. I devoured it. Sometimes I'd listen to the chapter more than once bc it has such symbolism I did not want to miss. Beautifully written and one of my favorite settings. It will go on my top 10 list of favorite reads. I could easily relate to Jesse, the main character, all throughout the book. And to her journey of self discovery. Some of it has been my journey too. Just a feast for the soul. One I will have to buy to add to my bookshelf as a keeper. 5 Stars!!!!!!!!!!!!

This was just the summer tale I needed about a girl returning home, having a total breakdown while dealing with her mother’s breakdown and confronting all of her demons at once. Oh yeah, there is also an affair with a monk and mermaids. I love the scene where she makes an oath to herself in a sort of marriage ceremony promising to love herself first and most of all. I think we can all take a tip from her on that one ☝

This is a ridiculous story about a selfish conceited person having a midlife crisis and really not caring much about the damage her decisions make. Totally unrealistic men: her cuckolded husband (on learning the truth): “..he’d hoped his suffering was not being squandered, that somewhere inside it was making him pliant and tender.” Right. That’s just where most men go - gosh i hope this makes me soft and fluffy. Right after the homicide thing.
At one point she admits to relating to the princess and the pea - my all time least favorite tale. On 30 mattresses and STILL the bed’s not soft enough?: “I felt as if I’d found the fairytale pea”.
Pretty much everyone else in the story is more interesting and compelling than our protagonist (i use the word loosely). Ugh.

The main character in this book just seemed like a whiner to me. Boo hoo, my husband won't "let" me be myself. Ummm, let's see, is it his job to "let" you be yourself, or was that your job all your life while he was supporting the family so you could putz around decorating your lovely Victorian house and messing with your little collages that never go anywhere? I found nothing wrong with her husband. He seemed like an intelligent, sensitive guy, and the minute he lets her out of his sight she's boinking a monk. This is her solution to him not "letting" her be herself. Gimme a break.
Plus, this is the second book Kidd wrote with weird new-Agey, quasi-feminist quasi-religious rituals in them. It might seem deep to some people, but to me it just seems frivolous and hokey. Religion is serious business. throwing threads in the ocean and holding hands is just girlish silliness compared to a real religion. I'm not sure what the point of this stuff is supposed to be.
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I thought The Mermaid Chair was a Secret Life of Bees for the grown woman.
Sue Monk Kidd really gets in to the soul of a woman's feelings and you grow extraordinarily attached to the characters. I am probably being presumptuous but my first reaction is men will probably not find this novel as intriguing as women but hey, you might just surprise me. I enjoyed the setting being close to home and also the religion in the background made the story even more compelling.

The first sentence of the book could be taken as a warning of adult content: "In the middle of my marriage, when I was above all Hugh's wife and Dee's mother, one of those unambiguous women with no desire to disturb the universe, I fell in love with a Benedictine monk."


The Mermaid Chair that inspired the novel, courtesy of wikimedia

The year was 1988, Jessie Sullivan was 42, and she'd wrapped herself in a cocoon of comfortable mundanity. Jessie had escaped from the coastal island where she grew up into the security of marriage and motherhood, and after 20 years, with Dee away at college, Hugh was getting on her nerves. Jessie had been estranged from her mother Nelle, but when Nelle did something exceedingly strange, Jessie ran back to Egret Island, ostensibly to help Nelle, and effectively hiding from Hugh.

Brother Thomas (Whit) was on the brink of a crisis too: acedia, or spiritual listlessness. I've read that a lot of us are feeling this due to Covid. Brother Thomas was sorting out whether he had a spiritual vocation or was using the monastery to hide from the world. He'd probably made it thus far because he got to spend a lot of time in the rookery, alone out on the marsh.

Sue Monk Kidd's gorgeous writing is thick with the atmosphere of imaginary Egret Island in the barrier reef off the South Carolina coast. The novel is loaded with religious and psychological symbolism and feminine spirituality. I wasn't as intrigued by the mermaids as I had been by the black Madonnas of The Secret Life of Bees, but I was fascinated by the Gullah culture personified by Nelle's friend Hepzibah.

Preserving Gullah (youtube)
Those Beautiful South Carolina Islands People (Gullah) (youtube)

Penguin's Reader's Guide, for those who want to dig deeper.

I read the paperback, found at a library sale, printed in the USA, set in Adobe Garamond.

Around the year in 52 books challenge notes:
6. A love story

Ultimate Popsugar reading challenge notes:
38. a book about art or an artist

meh.

**WARNING: NO SPECIFIC SPOILERS, BUT MAY HAVE SOME SPOILERS**
religion, adultery, mermaids... a woman "finding herself" through adultery? let's see, what was my problem with this? (she tried to explain some of these, but not enough for me.)

1. you call her mom crazy? really? she did one outlandish thing, otherwise she seemed fine. oh, once she was rude when she got a gift? i don't know, maybe when you have lived with someone truly out of their mind, you know you don't look for ONE event, ONE secret as to why, and you sure as hell wouldn't get it if you did look. i have to argue that this is "acting out", not insanity. and the explanation they finally gave for her acting out didn't even make sense as to how exactly that led to her actions.

2. she supposedly cared for her husband, but fell in love with another guy (a monk). oh, wait. no, she had already decided she didn't want to go home before fortunately that monk walked by, so she could get laid in the meantime since she really NEEDED that. to find herself, you know. she did NOT fall in love. in what world is that love? "i am kind of sick of my husband and ... oooooh, his eyes!" we know nothing of this guy other than one tragedy in his background and that he's currently a monk, and she doesn't seem to know anything additionally herself.

3. let's go back to "she cared for her husband". if really everything was fine, except one thing bothered you, you would never ever try to actually TALK to him? if you were attracted to each other, you loved each other, you had a good family, beautiful home... you just feel like he dismisses your ideas. he made you feel slighted, so you made him feel like his whole world was crumbling. how about, "you know, honey, i feel like you dismiss my ideas." then he can say, "oh, i'm sorry, i didn't realize i made you feel that way." then she could say, "oh, okay, just don't do it again and then i won't f-- a monk after all." maybe it wouldn't be exactly THAT easy, but it sure would be a lot easier to deal with than adultery.

4. she was also restless in her marriage because she lost herself in her roles in life, eh? too bad she didn't have an outlet, her own thing, that her husband supported. like you know, her art, where she had all her supplies and even a cool designated area for her to work on it. again, apparently actually getting more time in with her art, or heck, taking up a new hobby, was more far fetched than just f---ing a monk, so apparently wasn't even considered as an alternative.

5. why in the world was he a monk? was he religious at all? didn't he chose her just cause she happened to walk by, too? and most of all: a monk was sleeping with a married woman without any thought to the fact that it might hurt the husband? not that he would know the pain of a husband losing his wife... oh, wait, he DID. kind of quick to forget your own sad tale when it comes to getting laid, eh? if not religious, shouldn't he had at least not been an ass?

"In the middle of my marriage, when I was above all Hugh's wife and Dee's mother, one of those unambiguous women with no desire to disturb the universe, I fell in love with a Benedictine monk." Intriguing first line. The author did a good job painting a picture of a bored wife who found excitement in the most unusual place. Great job with weaving a dream-like location too. Where is this Egret Island anyway? For some reason, I imagine this book being made into a movie with Diane Lane as the lead. Probably because it is so much like Unfaithful (in terms of infidelity as a theme) and Nights in Rodanthe (in terms of the setting). But the real meat of the matter is the secret of the Mermaid Chair, and why the bejesus did Jessie's mother cut her finger off? The ending is just "ideal", exactly where i would want Jessie to be. It's just a little devoid of bells and whistles and the "grand" finale.

I am conflicted about whether to give this book one star or five stars. Kidd has her main character say, "I guess I mean art should evoke some kind of reaction in a person, not just look beautiful." She certainly evoked a reaction in me!
The main character, Jessie Sullivan, is a 42-year-old woman who feels stifled in her marriage; she has become "molded to the smallest space possible." "My life had started to feel so stagnant, like it was atrophied. Everything shrunk down to the roles I played." So when her mother seems to be having a psychotic episode, she leaves her husband Hugh at home (who is a psychiatrist and a kind man, hello? wouldn't he have been helpful?), goes back to her childhood home on Egret Island, and immediately falls in love with a novitiate monk. She says, "There was no assertion of will when it came to falling in love. The heart did what it did. It had its own autonomy, like a country unto itself." Ha! I don't believe that. . . falling in love at first sight? She maybe fell in lust but she didn't fall in love. I was put off by Jessie, really frustrated that she would give up her marriage so easily. She says her essential problem with her husband Hugh is not that they have grown apart, but that they have grown "too much together." What? It made me want to scream. Here's another comment from another character that I hated: "I'd been married twenty years. Twenty. Which is about when the marriage glue gets so old it starts to harden and crack." I didn't like marriage being treated so disposably.
By contrast, in the novel three wonderful and eccentric women, one of whom is Jessie's mother, made a pack to bind their lives together by twisting three strands of yarn, one for each women, and tossing it into the ocean on one of their May Day All-Girls-Picnics. And they are wonderful, supportive, good friends. Later in the novel, a monk says about living in a monastery that "the whole point of existing here with these curmudgeonly old men [was that:] somewhere on the face of the earth, there needed to be people bound together with irrevocable stamina, figuring out a way to live with one another." Why isn't that binding true of a marriage relationship?
Five stars would have to be because of the wonderful writing and imagery. The storyline is compelling. Jessie's mother's craziness is linked somehow to losing her beloved husband in a boating accident years before when Jessie was a child, and Jessie (in addition to her affair!) is trying to help figure out how to help her. There are wonderful characters, good people, great ideas phrased beautifully. I think this book would make a spirited book club discussion about love and life and marriage. I actually was satisfied with the ending even though I fought against judging the main character. Her husband said, after learning of her affair, that "he didn't want to bring the grace of understanding" into her reasons for leaving him. I didn't either. But there were no bad guys in the story, just difficult situations, personal growth, and learning about yourself. Let me end with one lovely quote that shows the five-star nature of the author's writing: Life "truly is enormous, appalling, devastating. You see the great sinkholes it makes in people and the harrowing lengths to which love will go to fill them."

this book was horrid! if you want to read anything by sue monk kidd read The Secret Life of Bees that book has meaning and structure.

i thought the premise of this book, middle aged woman decides she is dissatisfied with her life so she has an affair and finds out that the "terrible" secret from her past is really actually boring, was so hackneyed i couldn't even finish reading. i skimmed to the end to find out the secret, and then laughed at the absurdity of it all.

don't bother with this book, spend your time somewhere else.

I first gave this book 4 stars as I struggled with how much I truly liked it. Now, several weeks later sitting to write a brief review, I found that it's multiple themes continue to resonate with me, and I added the 5th star. I found the imagery of the island setting, and the mom's house, and the church, and the outdoor scenes, just wonderful. Using the Sue Monk Kidd's own form of art (writing) to parallel her main character's art (painting), SMK put me in her story. Then the characters were also vivid in their struggles and, more pertinent to the story, their mistakes. While I sensed at the midpoint that, while I thought I saw what was coming and what I saw left me feeling it would not "end well" for the main characters, the author pulled off the upset by making what I thought would me "not well" into a wonderfully melancholy and hopeful ending. Not a bang, but something softer, and something almost sensible, and still very sweet. But not an ending with a tidy little bow, because you are left to wonder, and maybe to hope, that it ends well. No other ending would have made sense for me, as much as I wanted another ending earlier in the book.

We all have likely struggled with a decision or two that would change the course of our lives. The Mermaid Chair reminds us that there are no guarantees that there are easy answers to tough questions. There are often easy choices, but too often the right choices are the tougher choices. The affair in the book symbolizes to me the "easy" choices that we "want" to make. The fantasy life we pretend we can have. However, the affair is ultimately seen by the main character for what it was - a temporary cure for a symptom rather than a cure for a condition. I believe there are too many real world similarities where the symptoms are continually treated at the expense of the emotional condition that remains untreated, which is why I found the ending to be bittersweet. She resolved herself to overcoming her condition of wanting "more" or at least "different" and began to see what was in front of her from the beginning.

I had not read SMK previously, and was led to this book by someone who had. I am thankful for both that friend and now this book.

Wow, that was some rambling. If you are still reading, I loved the book. More a coupe of months later after skimming it again than I did after reading it the first time.