Walking the Wall

The Mermaid Chair
by Sue Monk Kidd literally jumped off the shelf at me. I love anything
to do with mermaids, so the name alone caused me to pick the book up. Past the initial title, the back cover, last
paragraph caught my attention, it reads:

The Mermaid Chair is
a vividly imagined novel about mermaids and saints, about the passions
of the spirit and the ecstasies of the body. It illuminates the
awakening of a woman to her own deepest self with a brilliance and
power that only a writer of Kidd’s ability could conjure.

I think that the prologue is the best written part of the entire book, which is unusual, and it starts:

In the middle of my marriage, when I was above all Hugh’s
wife and Dee’s mother, one of those unambiguous women with no desire to
disturb the universe, I fell in love with a Benedictine Monk.

What a great way to start a book out, just lay it on the
table, here it is, now lets see what we can do with it!  I loved
it. I have written in the past about my great love of bending the
bottom of pages that have some particular quote or thought that caught
my attention on it–this book now has a very large number of pages bent
on the bottom, a good indication of how much I enjoyed reading it. Some
are thought provoking things that merit their own entries, others are
just sentences that are particularly good, like:

I’d gone inside to a stillness that was bewildering in its intensity (29); and It was a voluptuous laughter, and mischievous, like children laughing (89).

One is marked because it did something that few books (or
even movies) accomplish, it made me laugh out loud (be advised, the
word “penis” is going to used more than once):

That time Mike was eight and got his poor penis stuck in a
Coke bottle while urinating into it–for reasons none of use ever
understood. His penis had, shall we say, expanded somewhat after entry.
Mother had tried to act concerned but broke down laughing. She told
him, “Mike, go sit in your room and picture Mother Teresa, and your
penis will come right out” (41).

(I wonder what kind of search hits I’ll be getting because
of the above snippet.) There were many more, but I don’t want to give
away the story, and this is a book that is well worth reading. It is,
beneath it all, a simple story, it isn’t a story of great heroism, or
great deeds, or a great journey to distant lands–it is a a story of
the desperate quietness one woman found herself in, the box we are
sometimes jolted into seeing we have lived in, and how she dove deep,
deep in order to eventually come up free.