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' "So, did they.... divorce?" Aoife asked, pronouncing the final word in a whisper, because that is how you always had to say it [...] some fatal illness that might be contagious'
My M-i-L does that.
'Why is it that 24 hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager?'
'"pull yourself together now" the house was full of people'
'terrifying rows where suddenly an end you thought would never come rears up in front of you'
'a very clear speaking voice' (meaning LOUD) and the fact that she discusses Michael's bedwetting and other personal things loudly and inappropriately. (My M-i-L said some unforgivable things about me to one of my friends on my wedding day...)
and my favourite (of the odd behaviour during the heatwave)
They act not so muchout of character but deep within it.
*drums fingers and waits for someone else to finish*
I've finished and just hadn't spotted the thread. I found it very readable but not in a thinking too deeply about it sort of way. Although my family is very different (don't talk about anything at all particularly nothing inappropriate and there are never very many people) so I probably didn't get the recognition moments that LindsD seems to have had.
I loved it. And I loved the Happy Ending, - everything and everyone was clearly going to be All Right. So very comforting, if not very likely.
I loved all the complex interrelationships, and the way they are gradually laid bare as the story goes on. I liked the way the different characters, in different places, are linked in a single moment of time. And they are all depicted affectionately, so that one can love them (except for Monica's two horrible step-daughters and their mother).
I too found the pronunciation of Aoife - or rather, the not-knowing-how to pronounce it - annoying until I hit p 124, where it is described in detail. However, that may be symbolic of Aiofe's complexity.
p 9 - Gretta "says a swift novena for her youngest child under her breath". - You can't say a swift novena; a novena by definition is a series of prayers said over a succession of nine days. She could have said a swift Hail Mary or an even swifter Glory Be, but not a swift novena.
p 257 - Gretta is remembering, so the words are in accord with her thoughts, and the words say: "they left early in the morning to make it in time for the special Mass the priest was giving." A priest doesn't "give" a Mass. He "celebrates" Mass, or more informally he "says" Mass. (Or perhaps Irish Catholics talk about a priest "giving" Mass, I wait to be corrected on that one).
p 5 "swarms of red-backed aphids..." Aphids? The description of them is not remotely like aphids, which are those soft-bodied greenfly and blackfly that burgeon on the growing tips of roses, broad beans and other such. These creatures sound more like beetles, possibly ladybirds which do sometimes appear in swarms.
A quirky little touch that I loved: p 133, Monica is looking through the glass of the bathroom window, and "thinks of how she once read somewhere that gradually, after years and years, panes of glass become thicker at the bottom, that glass, while appearing solid and dependable, is subject to a slow, invisible downward creep".
I'm sure someone once told me that "glass is a fluid of infinite viscosity" - in the sense that its molecules are arranged like those of a fluid, not like those of a solid. If it was "almost infinite viscosity", I suppose its molecules would gradually creep downwards. Is there a physicist on the thread, who could confirm this?
I well remember '76, which was one of the things that I liked about the book. My eldest was born in '74, and my second in '77, and the intervening two summers were long, hot and dry, - I was so glad my pregnancies fell during two cooler years.
Sad that it's an urban myth. So the viscosity of glass is infinite, rather than almost infinite? Or is it not a fluid of infinite viscosity at all, but a common-or-garden solid?
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Jun 2025