There’s a reason we should leave our ‘best of’ lists until the last possible moment… because sometimes you read a winner in the last few days of the year. Love and Missed by Susie Boyt is such a book.
It’s the story of school teacher, Ruth. Her daughter, Eleanor, is a drug addict who has just had a baby, Lily. Ruth makes a somewhat impulsive decision to take over the care of her granddaughter, and her life is transformed by Lily. At the same time, she despairs over her relationship with Eleanor – tentatively making advances and then retreating, Eleanor’s responses prickly and unreliable.
Sometimes I thought the more Eleanor evaded and erased me the more I needed her.
As Lily grows into a teenager, Ruth reflects on the curative power of love.
Here’s what I loved:
1. The writing. It’s straightforward – there are no complicated layers and Boyt doesn’t play with structure, but she does manage to deliver wit and tragedy in perfect measure.
On sitting with a group of women in her small living room, Ruth observes –
It was intimate almost to the point of suffocation, that little room throbbing with stretched feminine nerves…
In meeting with Eleanor one day –
I didn’t know how I was going to keep buoyant. The exorbitant levels of pride my life seemed to demand.
And demonstration of Boyt’s all-round skill –
There was a slippery glamour to the teenage schoolgirl. Everything was becoming to them: fury, outrage, when they were sullen or sleeping at their desks, blowing smoke rings into the air at the bus stop with concentration, speed-eating hazelnut yoghurt between lessons, boxing up crimson spaghetti sauce in the domestic science lab, ponytail fronds dangling in the Tupperware.
2. Ruth’s best friend, Jean. Jean is a star. We all need a Jean in our life.
When a doctor suggests Jean tries antidepressants, she says –
‘I suppose I’m more a cup of tea and a sit-down, get into bed with a good book kind of grin and bear it, gin and bear it person, two glasses of wine and a Camembert eaten straight from the box with a spoon when the chips are down. Not that I’m against pills. I just see them as a last resort… Fine for others but not quite for me. Like bridge, perhaps. Or the tango.’
Ruth’s observations about Jean are to the point and funny –
I was trying to think how Jean would have responded. There would have been an awful lot of fucks.
Jean gave Lily a long red tin printed with Swiss mountains, full of coloured pencils… It was big of her, especially as she’d recently confessed that her grandsons … were only interested in appalling things like rowing and playing the trombone.
[Jean says] ‘Could you see me in a chandelier earring?’ Her form was merciless.
Of fifteen-year-old Lily, Jean says –
‘She’s got the writing of a gin-and-cigarettes novelist who’s haunted by past love affairs and given away her son.’
3. The humour. It’s rare that I laugh-out-loud when reading, but Boyt is exactly what I like.
It might just be me, but I sometimes I found babies a bit cynical round the edges. Their been-here-before auras often registered as smug. No other species considered itself so distinguished while being so glaringly generic, surely? But Lily was civilised and high-spirited. She met the world with wonder and awe. She was aware of her strengths but she didn’t think she knew everything like some babies.
When Jean said, ‘Caroline likes a velvet cigarette pant in the evening,’ I thought, this won’t end well.
I absolutely loved this book. And really, it missed nothing.
4.5/5
Ruth meets Eleanor in a park on Christmas Day –
I got my courage up and spread three red-checked dishcloths on the old bench, placed some gold paper plates in a triangle, unwrapped the turkey sandwiches I had made, the meat half white, half brown, still warm, the butter glistening.
