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The Woman Upstairs

Claire Messud

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Feb 10, 2015 Erin rated it liked it

Why do Claire Messud's books always SOUND like books I would love then I always wind up disappointed? It's as if she's writing for a very small group of people - all of whom take for granted that everything that matters happens to a handful of artists and academics and everyone else is, just....the woman upstairs. I will give her this, though: she can write rage like no one else. Read the first two pages of the book and you know exactly who Nora is and what she feels:

How angry am I? You don't w Why do Claire Messud's books always SOUND like books I would love then I always wind up disappointed? It's as if she's writing for a very small group of people - all of whom take for granted that everything that matters happens to a handful of artists and academics and everyone else is, just....the woman upstairs. I will give her this, though: she can write rage like no one else. Read the first two pages of the book and you know exactly who Nora is and what she feels:

How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.

I'm a good girl, I'm a nice girl. I'm a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody's boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents' shit and my brother's shit, and I'm not a girl anyhow, I'm over forty fucking years old, and I'm good at my job and I'm great with kids and I held my mother's hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephone - every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here's it's pretty gray and a bit muggy too? it was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter /friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.

Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish and my worry now is that we're brainwashing them from the cradle, and in the end even the ones who are smart will be damned foolish. What do I mean? I mean the second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time they get to my classroom, to the third grade, they are well and truly gone - they're full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits and they care how their hair looks! In the third grade. They care more about their hair or their shoes than about galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics. How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? Even worse on your tombstone than "dutiful daughter" is "looked good"' everyone used to know that. But we're lost in a world of appearances now.

That's why I'm so angry, really - not because of all the chores and all the making nice and all the duty of being a woman-or rather, of being me- because maybe these are the burdens of being human. Really I'm angry because I've tried so hard to get out of the hall of mirrors, this sham and pretend of the world, or of my world, on the East Coast of the United States of America in the first decade of the twenty-first century. And behind every mirror is another fucking mirror, and down every corridor is another corridor, and the Fun House isn't fun anymore and it isn't even funny, but there doesn't seem to be a door marked EXIT.

Wow. Intense. And good. I was excited about this promising beginning, but then found myself having difficulty understanding some of Nora's motivations (or lack thereof) and portions seemed repetitive in the middle. Nice, unexpected end, but overall Messud leaves me cold, I think. Good, maybe, but just not for me? ...more

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Oct 13, 2014 Candice rated it liked it

When I heard descriptions of the book, I thought that Nora Eldridge lived upstairs from the Shahids, but the Woman Upstairs is a metaphor coined by Nora to describe herself. "We're always upstairs...We're the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation, the woman upstairs is who we are, with or without a goddam ...more

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Nov 26, 2013 Karen rated it it was ok

I found this book really annoying. It's kind of in the genre of "woman who stay single too long end up unhealthily obsessing over people who don't care that much about them." Like Notes on a Scandal, without the scandal. In fact, not much of anything happens, except at the very end. Throughout the book I felt mad at Nora for not having the perspective to recognize that having some new friends is not major news. ...more

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