Woman on the Verge deals with maternal ambivalence, those emotions generated when women want to be mothers yet hate mothering itself. Hooper deftly captures the love/hate relationship: the adoring of those tiny bodies loving you while simultaneously being overwhelmed by the constant “me, me, me” needs of children. Couple that with a clueless spouse, little life outside of marriage and motherhood, and the loss of self, and you have a recipe for a disgruntled wife.
The story is told through the points of view of three women: Nicole, a former photographer turned mother who feels devoured by her life as wife and mother; Katrina, a woman in much the same boat, who finds relief in an affair with a handsome younger man; and back in the 1980s, Rose, who suffers from the same torments, but abandons her family for her career.
Nicole is a complicated, messy protagonist, who is trying to hold her life together while her father is dying. The unraveling of her marriage as her father dies feels real as do the descriptions of the expectations placed on women to be the perfect wife, perfect mother, to keep a perfect home, and to remain young and sexy. The lives of these three women intertwine in a very unusual fashion in the final fourth of the book which can’t be revealed without spoilers, but I wasn’t particularly wild about the ending; it seems to cheapen the character involved emotions. Readers should be aware that there are some fairly sexy parts which might turn off more conservative readers. There are also a lot of quotations from feminist authors which I felt were too obvious, too frequent, and too long.
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Woman on the Verge (Lake Union Publishing, July 1, 2025) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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