Becoming the person you want to be

This week at the Gilpin Library

by Larry Grieco, Librarian

Claire Messud has won numerous writing awards, and her latest book, The Woman Upstairs, is sure to garner a few more. Nora Eldridge is an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but before that she dreamed of becoming “a successful artist, mother and lover.” One day she realizes she is simply the “woman upstairs, a reliable friend and neighbor always on the fringe of others’ achievements.” This all changes when she meets the Shahids, newly arrived in the U.S. from Lebanon. She teaches their son, Reza, “a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale.” His father, Skandar, is “a dashing professor who has come to Boston for a fellowship at Harvard.” And then there is Sirena, “an effortlessly alluring Italian artist.” A schoolyard incident draws Nora into the world of the Shahids, and she finds herself “falling in love with them, separately and together.” Suddenly she begins to feel a new self emerging from the shadows. She feels like the Nora she dreamed of becoming before the dream was lost, and now she is awakening to find it real. The New York Times Book Review: “Masterly, penetrating, splendid…A novelist of unerring talent.”