About the book

There’s no book. Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties is a sort of container which keeps Maggie in. She’s like a jinn in an oil lamp. You touch the container, you let Maggie out, and she starts complaining about her life.

I’ve never felt like a therapist to a fictional character before, but Maggie made this experience possible. She entered my reading life, made herself comfortable and for the next several hours relayed each and every thought and trouble of her first year as a divorcee.

About Maggie

Her husband is divorcing her. She’s devastated. For years her life orbited around her family only, but now her husband is swooshed away by a midlife crisis, and her adult kids have their own lives. She’s lost, confused and grieving. She doesn’t feel noticed or needed. The last time she did feel noticed was when she was thirty (hence the title).

Maggie is mainly fixating on

• why her husband left her. Was it her body? Was it his work? Was it the way she kissed? Was it the was she didn’t kiss?
• what others think about her. Do they notice her? Who noticed her? Why did they notice her?
• what she did to others. How could she? Could she? Was it ok then? Is it ok now?

Maggie is full of doubts, whether she’s in Rome, or in a new house, or at work. Her mind is full of “maybes”. Here’s what it looks like:

…maybe he, like I, was bereft over our children leaving home.

Maybe he really had changed… Maybe we both had.

Maybe it was not the autumn of my romantic life. Maybe there was some spring left in me after all.

But maybe, I thought – just maybe – …

So you did, Maggie. There are 112 “maybes” (on 254 pages).  And I haven’t even calculated all instances of “probably” and “perhaps”. Maggie is full of uncertainties and she knows it.

I know I’m overanalyzing it, but that’s kind of what I do.

The only breathers happen when Maggie is having conversations with somebody other than herself. But even then, for god knows what reason, Maggie interrupts the dialogues in order to inform us what a cup looks like, or how many dandelions she has picked already.

Anything about the book?

No, there’s NO book! There’s no plot! It’s a year in a woman’s life during which she takes a trip, talks to her kids, meets friends, makes some changes. Sometimes she goes shopping, sometimes she tries new make-up. She changes her hair colour (oh no, is this a spoiler?  ) She cuts tomatoes. In fact, when I was 94 percent into the book and Maggie was still just cutting tomatoes, I braced myself for the book to end on her picking up a cucumber to cut next. Thankfully, it ended on a nice closure of one major question. I’m glad that was the moment I last saw Maggie, and that I didn’t have to say goodbye to her when she was just making a salad.

Final thoughts about Maggie

Maggie is the only reason I’m giving this text two stars. I like her, even though she often sounds like a friend who gets drunk and then goes on and on about her ex. Maggie is still fun. She can joke. She would make a good book reviewer!

Jean [Maggie’s friend] has shelves full of apocalyptic-type novels. Some of them are strangely good, though the main takeaway is that if you manage to survive the beginning of the end of time, your reward is prolonged misery, and maybe the occasional roll in the hay with some survivor who’s even more screwed up than you are.

Would I recommend meeting Maggie?

If you are looking for an imaginary friend, but the one who wouldn’t really be there for you and instead would need you to be there for her, then you will love meeting Maggie.

Laura and Emma became my punishment for opting to read a bad book till the end. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure the book was bad and I’m still not. Maybe I am just witnessing the beginning of a new era in book writing, the era of books with no plots.

After all, several years ago an idea of broadcasting mundanities of ordinary lives would sound obscene, and yet there’s Big Brother now.

Thus, maybe Laura and Emma is not a bad book, but a pioneer, the first book of plotless genre. Maybe the book is a reality show for readers. The characters go to work, run errands, do their shopping, argue, have dinners. They even go to the sea, twice, but no plot happens there either.

The characters themselves are realistic, although they do change their personalities quite abruptly while nothing in the plot prompts them to. Because there’s no plot. Duh! The language is good; easy, but not primitive. It doesn’t reveal any disappointments lying ahead. It tricks you into following this spineless creature, curious of what would become of it. At some point it feels like Emma would pick up the role of the main character, but she is born too late, and by the time she reaches the age where she can lead the book to its plot, the book is already over.

It was the first time I went against my principles and didn’t drop the book when it should have been dropped. I naively thought nothing worse could happen if I read till the end. I would at least get a sense of completion, right? But how can you get a sense of completion from something that has never started?! You are left with a string on which beads were being put on. You followed the string wishing to see what it would become in the end, but it just tears abruptly midway.

The book is a set of nice details that could theoretically be assembled into a fine construction, but the main piece went missing, and now it just cannot function.