The Family Retreat by Bev Thomas
For a good chunk of this novel, I was sure I was the wrong reader, or the right reader at the wrong time. I found the first page confusing and the something-terrible-is-going-to-happen hints an irritation. (I’m all for foreshadowing but this was forestalking.) Part of my problem might have been that I’d just finished another novel about young families on holiday, and that complaints about a GP (Jess was much more concerned and willing to learn from her mistakes than mine was) too close to home.
But then I began to admire how the author weaved in her themes of compulsive caring (which also features in my WIP) and the collective blind eye turned towards misogynistic micro-aggressions, even in the age of #MeToo. I particularly liked how Bev Thomas shows how even quite sensitive men don’t understand how difficult it is for women to shrug off these slights. (It was interesting to be reading this as a Spanish football manager refused to resign for kissing a member of the World Cup winning team without her consent.) Although I anticipated the plot twists, I enjoyed following them through.
A bonus was another fictional therapist to add to my collection. As the author is, like me, a former clinical psychologist, I found this convincing, although I don’t think Jess’s therapist needed to tell her that anger turned inwards is a theory of depression, but I suppose it does no harm to let the reader know.
Published by Faber, it’s a novel that can be enjoyed at different levels: as a feminist diatribe or page turning psychological suspense. A worthy follow-up to her debut, A Good Enough Mother, which also encompasses important psychological themes.
Other Women by Lisa Alther
This novel was recommended to me by someone who came across my series on fictional therapists. First published in 1984, it does seem dated forty years on (for example, Caroline’s shame about being a lesbian and Hannah’s chain-smoking through the therapy sessions), but there’s still much for the contemporary reader to enjoy. The story is easy to follow – fortunately so, given that I could only find a second hand copy, which turned out to be missing the first thirty pages – and peppered with humour that doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the main characters’ quandaries.
Unusually, it provides an insight into the therapeutic process, with particular emphasis on how the relationship follows the pattern stamped on the client’s psyche by parental figures (AKA transference) and how therapy can enable the client to make better choices in the future. But Hannah doesn’t seem to know about countertransference, which is when the therapist needs to interpret her own thoughts and feelings as communications from her client. Hannah’s musings on her own life read like distractions from the task at hand.
I wanted to applaud Hannah when she claimed to hold herself responsible for doing the best job she could but not responsible for her clients’ well-being. At last, I thought, a fictional therapist who understands boundaries. A few pages later, I discovered I was wrong.
Hannah invites her clients to phone her at home, although there is no reason for them to have her number. She isn’t ready and waiting when her clients arrive at her office at the appointed time. She burdens her clients with knowledge of her own tragedies and cuts a session short when she’s tired and her client has “nothing urgent” tell her. Indeed, she doesn’t seem to understand that the session begins the moment the client enters the room, failing to use silences and asking, “What do you want to talk about?” five minutes after the client has started talking.
Should I go on? I certainly got weary totting up her transgressions but, given that readers are rating this novel as a good example of therapy in action, I feel morally obliged to share a few more. It’s wrong to mention another client, especially when this person is your current client’s friend. It’s not good practice, but not too terrible to offer clients coffee, but it’s unforgivable to take them out to lunch. And, to confound the offence, to travel to the restaurant in the client’s car! But then Hannah hasn’t had a good role model in her own therapist who became a close friend.
Read this if you want to know about lesbian lives in 1980s America or how our early relationships with parents shape our lives. But if you want to know about how therapy works, look elsewhere.