The Woman Upstairs

One of the central tragedies of adulthood is that virtually no one reaches the childhood potential promised to them. There's simply only a handful of spots to truly be a protagonist in the national narrative. It was a blow to me to learn that I could become a great physician and a pretty decent scientist, but that it's extremely unlikely that I'll ever be known outside of my field. And it's particularly hard because once you make it to a field, you get to rub shoulders with the true giants and feel how little you are.

And that, in a nutshell, is the story of Nora Elridge. Looking at her life in her 30's and realizing that while she's a great teacher and an OK artist, she'll never make a name for herself and other people will always be better and more famous than her. And Nora sacrifices being the protagonist in her own, tiny little story, for being part of something grander. To pretend that this is a novel narrative would be foolish – and indeed, Messud acknowledges that by directly quoting the famous Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock (“No, am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; am an attendant lord, one that will do...”) – but it's such a central narrative to humanity that I think it's worth revisiting.

What makes Messud's take on this tale particularly noteworthy are two things: 1) Messud's command of the English language, which is simply incomparable. She never weighs the story down with prose, but each sentence is precise and beautiful. And 2) telling this narrative from a female lens.

I've learned that women are being asked to do too much, so even when I feel like I'm doing a good job at work, I feel like I'm not being the protagonist in my parenting story (since parenting is supposed to be a narrative of lovingly hand-crafted...everything, every moment); when I feel like I'm doing a good job parenting, I feel like I'm not being the protagonist in the canonical scientist story, where science is in all-consuming passion; and when I'm doing either, I feel like I'm losing the plot of the story of being a part of a community of friends and neighbors, or being a leftist who has time during business hours to call my senators or being a book hobbyist, or or or. And yet, I find very few books that resonate with this tension the way that The Woman Upstairs does.

I also think that reading the reviews for this book on goodreads is a pretty incisive tale on why this book is needed: women who don't make it to becoming the protagonist are expected to be Nice above all things. That, in fact, is Messud's point: women have to either be a central protagonist, or they have to be the Woman Upstairs, who follows gender norms, and is nice and helpful and has no personality or drive. It's biting and true. And yet, many reviewers here seem to fault Nora Elridge for not constraining herself to that role – quite exemplary of how this is a conversation that needs to happen.