For lack of a daughter, then – a proper daughter, a daughter who called more than once every couple of months, a daughter who visited more than once a year, a daughter willing to shoulder her way past the slammed-shut door of “Fine” every time she asked her mother, “How are things?”– Irene had managed to recruit herself a son.
Watching You Without Me is a psychologically astute family drama, and I'd almost go so far as to call it a domestic noir/thriller except that it never goes over the top into psycho-nanny/baby-snatcher/evil-ex territory. Instead, author Lynn Coady tells us a story about recognisably human characters doing their best in difficult times – even the character who adds menace to the narrative is acting true to his own nature and doesn't feel gratuitous or overblown. I enjoyed every bit of this. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Slight spoilers in plot overview.)
I was so grateful in that moment. When I tell this story now and people ask what I was thinking, it's this feeling of incongruous peace that I remember. It exists in my memory as the quick, satisfying sound of a zipper being hoisted. I never mention it, though – not that it seems so irrelevant compared to the details that come later, the juicy stuff that makes people cringe and cover their eyes. It's just that this is the moment of which I'm most ashamed. Ziiiipppppp! My pathetic gratitude. The wide-open door of it.When she was a know-it-all twenty-year-old, Karen told her mother that it was time she put Kelli – Karen's developmentally delayed older sister whose care consumed all of her widowed mother's time and energy – into a group home and get on with her life. Irene explained that this washer life and the ensuing fight saw Karen leave their Nova Scotia home for Toronto – where she went to school, got married, and divorced – and an unbridgeable chasm was thus opened between mother and daughter. When Irene eventually died of cancer, Karen returned home to arrange for Kelli's placement in group care, but over the weeks they spent together, Karen began to remember how special her sister had always been; began to wonder if she might actually be able to care for her sister as her mother had; and besides, what did she have back in Toronto to return to? Karen has help from the team of community support workers that her mother had hired, and one in particular – a forceful man named Trevor who has a close and teasing relationship with Kelli – appears to have been indispensable to Irene, and Karen is so grateful for his help that she allows him to become indispensable to her, as well. By the time Karen realises that Trevor is bullying and gaslighting her – and realises that he must have been doing the same to her mother – he is too entrenched in their lives to easily dislodge.
It's the characters who really bring this story to life. Kelli is totally real without being played for pathos or absurdity – her tics and stubbornness, her shy smiles and screaming; Coady does a wonderful job of showing how equally sweet and frustrating she would be to care for while always maintaining her dignity of character. Trevor might be a bully and a narcissist, but you can identify with the motivations that make him want to cling to this family. And it was interesting that Karen had lost her father when she was young – having been raised in a “girl-world”, Karen felt unprepared to deal with men, whether her erstwhile husband or the forceful Trevor. Whenever I'd be thinking, “Why don't you just throw him out?”, I'd then need to remind myself that that's what someone in a book might do, maybe not someone who just lost her estranged mother and who was now overwhelmed with the care of her sister and who had never really learned to talk to men. The way everything and everyone gels together just feels like real life.
I know that it's perverse, the pleasure I get from this whole process. That's why I've told this story as many times as I have, to so many different people. It's one of those pleasurable if not quite healthy compulsions, like picking obsessively at your cuticles.I also liked the format of having Karen address the reader periodically, as though personally and intimately unspooling her best yarn. The foreshadowing this allowed for was expertly and engagingly done and it helped to build a sympathetic relationship with the narrator (and especially when Karen points out what various listeners to her tale had interjected about what she could have done differently along the way, answering my own concerns and making her seem even more human; and especially since she could laugh about all this is the future). Everything about this was interesting and relatable – and in particular what it has to say about family relationships and what responsibilities we have to each other – and I liked the whole thing.
