What matters is giving over to what you love

17. The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd

I've owned this book for quite some time. It was given to me three and a half years ago by my good friend Diana, a woman I first met in January 2001 in a women writer's lit course. A handful of us who met in that class went on about a year later to form a book club, where one of the books we all read and adored was Sue Monk Kidd's now wildly popular The Secret Life of Bees. Before I returned to New Orleans after Katrina, Diana gave me Kidd's newest book, The Mermaid Chair, as an early birthday gift. It has languished on my bookshelves lo these many, many moons. My mother checked it out from the library three weeks ago, and I figured it was finally time to read it.

Kidd's writing is as lyrical as I remember it being in TSoB, and her exploration of the female psyche is as pointed as I remember it being in her first memoir, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (you really should read that one, Tracie -- I think you'll get a lot out of it, especially as I know how much you loved TMC). This is the story of Jessie who has ". . . lived molded to the smallest space possible, [her] days the size of little beads that passed without passion through [her] fingers." She gets a call early one morning from one of her mother Nelle's best friends telling her that her mother has deliberately cut off her right index finger with a meat cleaver in the monastery kitchen where she has been a cook for years. Jessie hurriedly returns to Egret Island, a barrier island off the coast of South Carolina, determined to elicit the source of her mother's madness. Coupled with caring for her mother, Jessie searches for an inner independence she realizes she's lacked in her twenty years of marriage. As with most questions like these, everything has to go to hell in a handbasket before minds, hearts, and souls can be mended. I got so wrapped up in the characters that I found myself crying when Nelle's story finally comes to light. This story is a feast for the senses (Kidd's descriptions of Egret Island are beautifully detailed), but it also quietly asks the reader to search herself, to ask if she is living her life for others or for herself?

Thank you, Diana my dear, for giving me another story to treasure.