The Prison Book Club (28 page)

When Carol had handed out Doyle's book to the men a month earlier, she described it as another example of a male author putting himself in a woman's shoes, like Lawrence Hill's
The Book of Negroes
. In this book, the shoes are those of Paula Spencer, a woman in Ireland who marries a local tough named Charlo. Charlo subjects her to physical and verbal abuse, and her own alcoholism clouds the picture. There is a riveting scene in which Paula could blurt out the real reason for her bruises to a nurse at the hospital, but doesn't, because Charlo is on the other side of the curtain, hearing all. Carol told the men it was a rollicking read about “a poor Irishwoman who's just got everything going against her. But she's a heroic character and I think you'll find her inspirational.”

I think I'd first read it in England, with one of my two book clubs there. While I understood why Gaston found some of the material later in the book difficult, I admired the early chapters, where Doyle beautifully captures the chemical rush of a teenage girl's crush and the confusion of a young woman in love. At the last Collins Bay Book Club meeting Carol had asked the men to read aloud from that scene to kick-start their reading, and it was strange to hear Paula's words, so familiar to me, in the mouths of the men. It was Gaston who had started off, reading aloud the bit from chapter 2 where Paula describes the collapsing feeling in her legs and her lungs when she first sees Charlo. Colin took over from Gaston, reading the passage about the fabulous plumes of smoke from Charlo's cigarette and how they danced to “My Eyes Adored You.” Gaston and Colin were both too young to get the nostalgia kick from the description of Charlo's 1960s stovepipe pants and loafers. But I got it, being essentially a contemporary of Paula's.

When we discussed the novel in our Toronto ladies' book club a month earlier, some of the women had strong opinions on whether I should have recommended it for the men. Lillian-Rose asked bluntly who screened these books. If an inmate had engaged in domestic abuse, she said, wouldn't the book provoke, disturb or even excite them? Ruth said that since Carol and I were not psychologists or therapists, how would we handle it if the material brought out something in a book club member that he hadn't faced before. But Carol and I explained that the men had managed well with other books about abuse and neglect, like
The Glass Castle
. In fact, every prison book club that had read
The Glass Castle
had absolutely loved it, Carol said. “Many of them have been through anger management programs and a lot of them have more self-knowledge than just about 95 percent of people I know,” said Carol. “I think it's a way to unpack what is really evil and have a frank talk about it.”

The discussion of Doyle's novel was the longest and most thoughtful of any Collins Bay Book Club discussion I had participated in to that point. We began by analyzing Charlo. Shockingly, the guys didn't see him as all that bad. Gaston pointed out that Charlo was a good father and not abusive toward his kids. Ben said he had a certain rebel appeal and only changed to become “unstable and moody” when the jobs dried up and he couldn't find work. Dread tried to counter Ben's point that Charlo changed. He argued that Charlo's violence was “in his DNA,” and then he joked that Ben was confusing the fictional character with his own reminiscences. The two bickered briefly.

“I'm talking,” said Dread, trying to make some space to be heard. “It's this aggressiveness,” he said, referring to Ben again. “You see what I mean, Miss?” Everyone laughed.

“Are you feeling abused again?” joked Carol, whose sense of humour usually got the conversation back on track.

“Slightly,” said Dread, feigning hurt.

Peter, who came in late, a little out of breath from jogging across the prison grounds, was the only one who slammed Charlo outright. “This kind of abuse is actually beyond abuse, in my opinion,” he said. “I don't even know what you call this. But I think it's his own sense of inadequacy that causes the abuse. He's looking in the mirror saying, I'm not much of a man. He beats her so he can be the bigger man, but the more he beats her, the worse he feels and it just gets into that cycle. And I think that's highlighted in the end, when he sees how strong and independent his daughter is.” What a strong, clear insight, I thought. Where had that come from?

“That's very helpful,” said Carol. “Because I think that we would all agree that there's some lack of self-esteem here in both these characters.” How about Paula, Carol wanted to know. What about her background?

Colin offered his précis. He said that while her family was really tight-knit, they lived in a relative state of poverty and she suffered from lack of privacy.

Carol probed further: “And what do we know about her parents?”

Peter said that we didn't know a lot but some things were being insinuated. “Tough love” was how Ben described it.

But Dread speculated that it was worse than that: the insinuation was incest. “The author never really explored it,” said Dread. “He just gave you a hint of it, then left it alone.” Dread had given the book a close read, I could see, as had Albert, who remembered the incest scene clearly with Paula and her siblings sitting on the father's knee and playing a game.

“Yeah,” said Carol. We recalled how Paula's father had beaten her older sister, Carmel, with a belt. I remembered how Paula misfiled that in her brain as okay because fathers were different then: cruel to be kind.

“I think right from the start, Paula had a rotten deal,” said Peter. “I don't think she was just a victim of Charlo. She was a victim of life. She was born into what she was born into and she didn't have a lot of options available, even before Charlo. She was basically told she was stupid, right off the hob, and then she realizes that she was poor.”

That whole question of victimhood was perhaps the most thought-provoking question of the day. Carol advocated that Paula was admirable because she didn't see herself as a victim. She eventually fought back. But Dread disagreed forcefully, saying that if she didn't see herself as a victim, why was she longing for hospital staff to ask her where the bruises really came from. It went to the heart of the question: do you need to see yourself as a victim in order to accurately sort out right and wrong and accuse your abuser? It was a hard one, because in the second half of the book, Paula's ruminations are so muddied by alcohol and perhaps head injuries, her memory so incoherent, the reader has difficulty knowing if she's a reliable narrator. I recalled how in our women's book group, Deborah said that Paula's scattered, out-of-sequence memories accurately portrayed the non-chronological way that abused women with “traumatic memory” speak, and that Doyle had captured the way these women present clinically.

Carol looked over at Tristan, who hadn't said anything yet, and asked: “Were you going to say something, Tristan?”

“No.”

“Well, I'd like you to come into the conversation at some point,” she said. It was only his second meeting as a volunteer and he seemed a bit tentative. Nevertheless, he responded to Carol's prompt, suggesting that Paula had some responsibility for her situation, but that it would be hard for her to squeal on Charlo.

Peter then drew our attention to the scene where Paula tries to sort out in her own mind why the abuse was happening. “It started with dinner,” he said. “Charlo came home, saying dinner wasn't made. She said, well you weren't there last night, so he said, well put on some tea and she told him to make his own fucking tea. And that's when he drove her and that's where it goes to the scene where she wakes up and he's over top of her and he says, you fell.” Then he described how Paula's thoughts returned again and again to that night, asking herself whether the abuse might never have started if only she had just done what she was told and made Charlo his tea.

“However, was she for some of you a heroine?” Carol asked. “Was she an admirable person?” Certainly Paula is heroic when she finally throws Charlo out of the house.

Dread offered that Paula was perhaps heroic because she didn't pass the abuse along to her kids. She took care of her family, even through her own alcoholism. But since the beginning of the meeting he had been wanting to talk about Doyle's writing style and so he took advantage of the fact that he had the floor to redirect the conversation. “I kind of disliked the style at first because it's all over the place,” Dread said. Carol asked him what he thought the author was trying to show with that mixed-up storyline, and the answer came to him: he said that it was Doyle's way of mimicking the mind of an abused and alcoholic character.

It seemed like a good moment to share the comments about the book from the women in our Toronto book club. I handed the sheet of comments to Carol. She read the comment from Deborah, who, as it happened, had worked as a therapist with abused women and with abusers. Deborah was pondering why women stay in abusive relationships. “So often they have childhood histories of abuse or emotional neglect and stay in abusive relationships, particularly if they have children, because they cannot imagine how to disengage and become independent,” she said. From that Toronto discussion, Deborah had left some unforgettable images in my head of the abused women she'd helped—women “with no teeth, with half of their faces bashed in, with one eye blinded, with hair pulled out that won't grow back and too poor to buy wigs.” They were not images of women who had power.

To Deborah's question, Dread provided another answer: “'Cause she's being abused, she internalizes it and tries to blame herself and see ways that she could have made things better, when the fault is not with her.” He had a way of talking that was a rapid, run-on monotone, as though warding off interruption.

“I agree with him,” said Colin. “My parents were like that. And my mother was complacent toward the actions that my father was doing to her. Like she would just pretend things weren't happening or try to change the topic and act like something else was happening. I see a lot of similarities to my mother and father's relationship as I do with Paula and Charlo.”

“She was in a state of denial,” said Carol. “I mean, is there anybody here who hasn't known about domestic abuse in their own family or in a family close to them?” From the response around the circle, domestic abuse was well-known to many.

“I was raised in an abusive home,” said Parvat, a new member with long hair and hooded eyes. “I read books about what to do and what not to do when I get into a relationship and have children.” So he'd tried self-help. And as I found out later he'd needed it because his experience was more traumatic than most. He told me his father had dangled him from the balcony by his feet when he was a young child because he had tried to prevent his father from hurting his mother. Parvat and his mother had lived in a shelter for victims of domestic abuse for a time.

“I salute you, Parvat,” said Carol in a maternal tone, referring to his self-help initiative.

Peter told the others that when he attended the family violence correctional program in prison, they said that one in nine women are abused. He was not happy about being in the program, saying his partner was bipolar and would throw things at him, then call the police when he walked out. In the program he was told that yelling back in an argument or walking away was abusive, advice that he was not sure he agreed with. Despite that view, Peter was keen to see more domestic abuse prevention. “I believe most abuse is learned,” he said. “If we could break the cycle.” The men suggested greater access to psychologists and psychiatrists.

“I think that you are enormously wise about your pasts and about how you move forward,” Carol said to all the men. If only Lillian-Rose and Ruth from our ladies' book club could have been in the room to see how sensitively the men had navigated the issues in the book, I thought.

When I'd originally recommended the book, I'd forgotten how much sex it contained, as Paula recalls her first encounters as an adolescent. Correctional Service Canada prohibits pornography, but not sexual content, in prison materials. Stieg Larsson novels, for example, aren't censored, despite the sexual violence. And
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors
was well within the rules. But I realized during the meeting that I was more comfortable talking about violence than sex with a roomful of male prisoners.

Before the meeting was over, Ben had one question about the sex. “There's a statement he made about eating fries off her knickers,” he said hesitantly, seeming to want an explanation.

Dread said to Ben, “Why would you remember that?” Then he looked at Carol and said, “He's disgusting, Miss.”

Everyone laughed.

Then Dread got the last word. “Your new name is Knicker Fries,” he said to Ben.

At coffee break, the men took time to write some responses to the women in the Toronto book club. One that stood out was the comment from Michael, who was serving time for his role in a drug trafficking operation. “The book captured the feeling of numbness abuse can have on a woman,” he wrote in non-cursive round letters. “Paula became a zombie by absorbing constant pain with little feeling. Her maternal instinct became her salvation.” He was talking about what finally gave Paula the courage to throw Charlo out of the house: the prospect that Charlo might turn his attentions to her daughter.

They also scribbled their questions to Roddy Doyle: Why did you write this novel? Did you witness this as you were growing up? Do you believe that abuse is learned and carried from generation to generation? Was holding back the abuse content of the book done for the purpose of maximizing the impact? (Doyle spends the first half of the book giving us Paula's memories of her adolescence and early relationship with Charlo, and leaves the description of the abuse and alcoholism for the second half of the book.)