Dear Reader,
As a writer, I can never predict where a great story idea might come from.
This time, it was a conversation with my ninety-one-year-old mother, who still works part-time, mixes a killer martini, and whose aspirational exit strategy is to be shot by a jealous wife. Mom and I were discussing books one night when The Feminine Mystique came up.
“That book changed my life. Did I ever tell you?”
When Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking work was published in 1963, I was still a baby. But five minutes into that conversation, I knew what I needed to write next.
Researching The Book Club for Troublesome Women, coming face-to-face with the rules, attitudes, and indignities that confined and constricted women of my mother’s generation, often moved me to anger – and profound admiration. The opportunities I take for granted were paid for by the generation of fearless, dauntless, troublesome women who came before.
That is one of the reasons I wanted to write this book, because too many of us have either forgotten or never knew that the rights and greater (though not yet complete) equality women take as a given today didn’t exist just generation or two ago.
I hope you’ll keep that keep that uppermost in your thoughts as you discuss the story. Think back on what life was life for women in 1963 as opposed to what it’s like today. Then consider what you’d like life to be like for the women of tomorrow. Freedom is fragile. Understanding its history and cost is crucial to preserving it for ourselves and for future generations.
Of course, that’s only one part of the conversation.
Book clubs will find so much fodder for discussion in these pages, so much – the personalities and motivations of the four main characters, the choices and course corrections they make as the story unfolds, the ways they support each other, or fail to support each other, as well as questions about what you might have done had you walked in their shoes, and the myriad ways in which a story set in 1963 still rings true to women today.
But women weren’t the only people on my mind as I was writing.
Juggling the demands of a two-career family isn’t easy. There’s a lot of push and pull involved, a lot of negotiation and compromise. Even so, looking back on my own four-decade long marriage, I can see how sharing the financial burdens let my husband and I say yes to new educational or vocational opportunities. Sometimes, sharing the yoke of responsibility also allowed us to temporarily step off the career path to focus on child rearing or caregiving, or gave us breathing room as we figured out how to navigate a new season of life.
As readers walk alongside Margaret and Walt Ryan as they slog through the growing pains of a marriage in transition, I hope they’ll consider how the back-in-the-day stereotypes that stifled and suffocated women made it harder for men to breathe too.
However, the core of this story is centered on the feminine experience, an experience that is unique to every woman.
If I had to pick out just a few lines from the book to sum up what I most wanted to say, it would be these…
“…there are countless good and right ways to be a woman and only two wrong. The first is to insist that your way is the way, the only way. The second is to buy into that nonsense and spend your life limping along an aimless path in shoes that will never fit.”
I wrote stories of four very different characters – Margaret, Charlotte, Viv, and Bitsy, collectively known as The Bettys, in homage to the woman whose book first inspired them to found the club – who travel four very different paths to fulfillment.
And if I’d written eight characters, or ten, or ten thousand, each of them would likewise have traveled a different road, a journey custom-fit for their singular personalities, circumstances, strengths, weaknesses, challenges, needs, desires, and dreams.
Just like in real life.
These characters are very dear to me. This book is very dear to me. But I wrote it for you.
Besides weaving a really good yarn, a page-turning story you can get lost in, I wrote it to supply you with viewpoints to consider and questions to mull over, aspirations to reach for.
Mostly, I wrote it in hopes that you would find something of yourself in these pages, and something of your sisters and mine, all the unique, imperfect, troublesome women of this oh-so troublesome and troubling world. Because no matter who we are or where we gather – at the office, the volunteer committee, or the neighborhood book club - need each other, still.
The Bettys of our mother’s generation lit the torch. It’s up to us to keep it going, to tend the flame and pass it undimmed – and hopefully brighter – to the Bettys who will follow behind, traveling the path our mothers broke and which we prolonged, pushing forward to the far horizon.
- Marie Bostwick
