(I figure while I’m writing about lit, I should write about my favorite books, too, no?)
I love The Hours. Love, love, with every fiber of my being, love. This book spoke to me like almost no other has.
If you’re not familiar with it: It’s the story of three women, living one day in their lives. Virginia Woolf has started Mrs. Dalloway; Laura Brown in reading Mrs. Dalloway in 1940s California, and Clarissa Vaughn is essentially being Mrs. Dalloway, throwing a party for her dear friend Richard in modern day NYC.
Michael Cunningham not only deftly weaves all these storylines together, but he gets what it’s like to be a woman familiar with the medical establishment and having your life dictated by others, all the time. His portrayal of Virginia had me crazily underlining paragraph after paragraph of goldmine goodness.
I read this book shortly before the movie came out in 2003. I was deep into crazy health issues–month+ hospital stays, home IV courses, transplant looming in the near future. I was also a college student. This was not what I was supposed to be doing. I was engaged, I had a double major, I had friends, I had a great life, and all this medical stuff was fouling it up and making it not the life I wanted to life. Virginia, in the book, is in the same place. She has left London, her passionately loved home, and is in the bucolic (then, not now) suburbs of Richmond, where she has gone for her “health.” She misses London desperately.
The book doesn’t have the following scene, but the movie sums up all of Virginia’s trapped, desperate feelings in one gorgeous scene:
The book asks us to consider our choices; to remember that every day is important; that nothing we do doesn’t have impact on the people around us.
I know it’s not a book (or film) for everyone. But I think you should give it a go, if only for the parts about Virginia, because the insight gained will be worth it.
Living Adventurously 