At sixty-six, Paula Spencer—mother, grandmother, widow, addict, survivor—has finally started to live her life. She has a job at the dry cleaners she enjoys, her boyfriend Joe is a text away when she needs him, and her four children now have the healthy families and petty dramas that Paula could have only hoped for. Despite its ghosts, Paula has started to push her past aside. That is until her eldest, Nicola, turns up on her doorstep one day. Nicola is everything Paula wasn't—independent, affluent, a loving wife and mother, a "success"—but now she is suddenly determined to leave it all behind. She has left her family and come to stay. As Nicola gradually confides in Paula the secret that unleashed this moment of crisis, mother and daughter must untangle past memory, trauma, and revelations to confront what they mean to each other—and who they want to be.
A novel of hauntings ... There is lightness here, too — lightness and humor. Gulls make a frequent appearance, symbols of independence ... Doyle is superb at channeling Paula’s interior voice: witty, cranky, desperately honest. The dialogue is spot-on.
I don’t want to hear from a man writing in the voice of a battered, alcoholic older woman (a well-worn template of female suffering). I just don’t ... The good news for Doyle is that I read his new Paula Spencer novel, The Women Behind the Door, anyway. And that he’s excellent at capturing the kind of tension I’m describing and the fraught stories we tell about ourselves as a result ... There’s much to admire here. And for Doyle fans, the novel will feel familiar: It is unflinching and dark, brutal in its economy, wry and mostly devastating.
The women...are so flawed: bruised, crass, guilt-ridden, incontinent, self-centered, blunt to a fault, furious at themselves and each other and the world. And they are such wonderful company: so funny, so direct, so emotional, so surprising ... A story about the tragedy of resilience. It’s wonderful that Paula has made it to this late chapter, in which a kind of fulfillment has finally appeared to be briefly at hand ... In Doyle’s crisp, wry language, the story of that pain is just the story of life, along with all its small moments of levity and unexpected connection.
