Sunday book pick: Husband vs best friend vs child vs career in ‘Goodbye Without Leaving'
At the heart of Laurie Colwin's 1990 novel Goodbye Without Leaving are the questions that trouble every modern woman: Who's my soulmate – my best friend or husband? Is a child worth trading a career for? What should I do about religion and spirituality as a feminist? And, will my mother ever let me be?
Being a Shakette
Graduate student Geraldine Coleshares has no interest in pursuing a doctorate degree and neither is she interested in following in her mother's footsteps and becoming a painter. If anything, she doesn't have a single creative bone in her body. The only art form that does interest her is music. Rock n' roll, in particular. Geraldine's mother detests her bohemian interests and would rather she found a more suitable niche. To fulfil the 'burning desire of her heart' (and spite her mother), Geraldine runs away to become a 'Shakette' with an all-Back rock n' roll group, Vernon and Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes. Unlike the others in the group, for whom travelling and performing and camping in buses is a temporary occupation, Geraldine tours with them for two years with no real plans for the 'real world'.
Her parents are at the end of their wits, but all will be forgiven if she marries well and settles down. The only link to her former life is her best friend, Mary Abbott. Geraldine describes their relationship as her not keeping any secrets from Mary, while Mary likes her most because Geraldine loves her the best. Severely practical, somewhat reserved, and in touch with her spiritual side, Mary is quite the opposite of Geraldine. She is preparing for a PhD degree and is quite likely in a relationship with her married professor. Mary doesn't say and Geraldine doesn't ask. Through the tumults of her childhood, Mary is the only one who has ever understood Geraldine's desperate need to be 'authentic' – something she experiences only after she joins the Shakette.
For a girl who has grown up comfortably with all material comforts, life as a Shakette isn't easy. The hours are long and brutal, drugs of all kinds are prohibited so there's no way to let loose, the food is terrible and they are always on the road. Still, it is a small price to pay to stay out of her mother's disapproving gaze.
So when the jaunty lawyer Johnny Miller attends her every concert in an attempt to pursue her, Geraldine tries every trick to ward him off. His upper-class background, Jewish faith, ample wealth, and a stable career would be everything that her mother would want in her son-in-law. And it is Geraldine's life's mission to never conform to her mother's wishes.
After rock n' roll
When the time comes to leave the Shakelys, reality hits Geraldine like a truck. With no real skills, she is not fit for employment. In the meantime, Johnny has convinced her to marry him and both sets of parents are planning a grand affair. Her stint as a dancer makes her an object of wonder in their social circles and Geraldine comes to despise going out. Geraldine proposes eloping and Johnny grudgingly agrees, but when she gets pregnant, in a final attempt at a rock n' roll lifestyle, Geraldine insists they keep the news from their parents. When they are eventually told, hell breaks loose – twice over.
The pregnancy worsens her identity crisis. She goes to work until she physically cannot anymore and actively resists the advice on childbearing and rearing from her mother and mother-in-law. The baby growing inside her is not as much of a problem as the expectations from her as a mother are. Until now, she hasn't been much of anything – daughter, wife, Jew. She doesn't even acknowledge herself as a singer or dancer and to real adults, being a Shakette doesn't mean anything at all.
Motherhood embalms her in its warmth but she learns that being a mother isn't enough either. Too much involvement with the baby turns it into a brat; moreover, who in this day and age can afford to lose their identity to a child? Part-time jobs and expensive nannies are recommended. Once Geraldine fulfils everyone's desire to be a wife and mother, it dawns on her that she's yet to come into her own.
And through it all, Mary seems to be the only person who really gets her. It is not her husband but her best friend she seeks when crisis strikes. It is only with her that she can be her true self. So when Mary says 'goodbye without leaving', Geraldine is spurred into action – it's time to do something about her own truth, to accept her faith on her own terms.
Geraldine's crisis is a rich woman's crisis. Even though she's at a perpetual risk of being excommunicated by her parents, she knows they'll never do it. Her crashouts come at the expense of no financial or social jeopardy – she has her family and their wealth to fall back on. Despite the troubles she constantly gets into, her carefreeness is to be envied. The question you will naturally ask yourself is: If given a chance, for how long would you postpone growing up?
Goodbye Without Leaving is a superbly whimsical novel about a rich girl who refuses to grow up. But when her own child poses questions about faith and the grand scheme of life, Geraldine finally realises she had it all figured out in her childhood – now, all she has to do is retrace her steps back to it.
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Gardens are also private little paradises where a lot of pivotal scenes in your novel are set, alongside the unabashed, unapologetic eating of the fruit, with its core and all. Am I making puzzling connections here, or were gardens and erotica on your mind, too, while working on this book? Oh, you're absolutely not making puzzling connections here — that's as bang on the money as it gets. My background in academics was a niche within a niche: in Comparative Literature, I was doing Memory Studies, and within that, Landscape Studies. That's a very complicated way of saying: I was writing about and looking at the ways national identity-making and memory-making define the way we shape our environment. 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Initially, when I started writing the novel, I didn't mean for it to have a diary chapter at all! I knew that there needed to come a moment of reveal for Eva, where we find out her true thoughts and desires and how she ended up at the house. My first idea of how to do that was very convoluted and involved a set of initials and an aunt and a trip to the local library — things that bored me just thinking about having to write them. So, I put them out of my mind and began writing the first chapters, figuring that I'd solve that piece of the puzzle when I got there. I realised in that process that Eva had a book with her, and that book was there so that she could take note of certain things and not use it much else, which is how I wrote that at first. The diary solution was a sudden one and one that I definitely struggled with for a few whiny days — I didn't want to take that route, worried I was going to fall into a gimmicky trap, worried indeed over the Anne Frank associations! I wanted to move away from conventional war narratives in many ways (another thread I desperately wanted to avoid: most war stories tend to focus on middle-class and wealthy families, because those are the families that tended to be able to afford the cost of hiding in someone's attic. Those are the ones who more often survived, because there was a delay in how long it took for them to get deported. There's a whole class element to who survived the camps that I rarely see spoken of, and I wanted that woven into the novel so badly … and simply couldn't make it work within the plot). What became clear, though, was that there was my will and then there was the story's desire towards the path of least resistance — a clean, neat story where no one ever leaves the house, and all the explanations needed are there already. In the end, Eva's diary chapter ended up being my favourite chapter to write. I wrote the first half on the six-hour train ride to Berlin, and the second on the return. It was such a relief to get to cast off Isabel's restrictive narrative voice, but especially to get to do it all in the form of a grand reveal. Much of it was cathartic: after a hundred pages of not-knowing, to get to kick down the door and scream out everything that's been happening below the surface. It scratched an itch I often have when in conversation with non-Jewish Dutch people, when the war comes up: this desire to shout, 'You don't even know what you don't know!' The choosing of what went in and what would go was a more collected, restrained exercise; a lot of the research didn't make it in, and I had to be careful and make sure that it still sounded like a diary, not a mouthpiece for academic research — a list of facts. When I sent it in to my editors for a first round of edits, I was sure she'd say that half of it had to go. Surprisingly, they both said: more of this chapter, more of Eva's voice. Great news for me, of course, I had plenty more to say! One of the most satisfying experiences of reading The Safekeep was its deliberate suppression of the characters' train of thought, as if verbalising what's on their minds would give finality, a real shape to their thoughts. Interestingly, as these words hung in the air, someone else would pick them up and carry the conversation forward, as if a co-creation of something mutually thought was being signalled. In the incompleteness of the dialogues, you perhaps wanted to test the thresholds these people could cross or wanted to respect. In that sense, could you reflect on the dialogue writing in the book? The primary rule with Isabel was — she cannot have access. Not to her thoughts, her desires, her feelings. When she feels anything at all, she starts pinching at herself; when she feels desire, she redirects it into anger. When she thinks something that in any way goes deeper than an inch below the surface, she cuts herself off. The moment Isabel has access to herself, that's when we, as her audience, can stop wondering why she is the way she is — and the tension is broken. Isabel herself believes she knows herself, and that fantasy is only maintained as long as she doesn't dig too deep. So much of the novel was writing out bits of dialogue or thoughts and then backspacing them out of existence immediately because 'Isabel would not know this about herself.' I wanted the unfinished nature of thoughts and dialogue to mimic also what it feels like to exist in an environment where history also serves as an unfinished thought. READ MORE: Review: The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden Finally, in celebrating the fierce fire-like desire of a bodily want, you note multiple times that a body doesn't exist unless it's forced into being in the moment during an act of love. While same-sex desires have been considered deviant, there's something utterly mechanical but also philosophical about the love between Isabel and Eva that you describe in the book. To me, so much of that has to do with the body as it's seen and unseen. Both Isabel and Eva enter into the narrative furious with how the world perceives them — they feel utterly invisible in their true form, and only visible as a projection. Isabel is seen by her brothers as an extension of their mother; Eva is seen by her lovers as a mirror image of whatever they want her to be. Neither woman is considered in full until they are pitted against each other. And what they see, at first, is something ugly. Both women despise one another, but there's at least the relief of being despised for who you are, rather than loved for who you're not. The physicality of their desire becomes an extension of that: the body responds to being perceived, especially through Isabel's perspective, which is so deeply tactile. From the very first page, you see how intensely she experiences the world. Everything is vibrant and green, and every smell is overpowering, and every sound is too loud. A breeze could knock the poor woman over! She exists in her body, and the body overwhelms her. The physicality she finds with Eva is both about truth and perception, and it's also about channelling the very tactile way she exists in the world into something physical — touch. Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
