num_pages: 88
description: In this slim volume of fragile prose, small-press author Seese acknowledges her spiritual and stylistic mentor, Joan Didion, whose sense of "only disconnect" pervades this aphoristic memoir of a middle-aged woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Mary from Detroit — the narrator with no last name, and a vaguely ethnic background — in fact descends into madness for a brief time. And during that period, she moves into an apartment in a poor neighborhood, away from her husband, and aches from the side-effects of her therapeutic drugs. Really, though, her craziness is hard to distinguish from her ordinary life of waiting at home, reading randomly, smoking cigars, knitting afghans, and staring out the window. Admittedly not a liberated woman, she also concedes her mean-spiritedness, the legacy of a father who likes to go rabbit hunting at Eastertime. Framed by Mary's memory of her best friend who died from cancer at an early age, this witty little book skitters nervously from topic to topic, recording Mary's clever apercus, chronicling her odd habits, and cataloguing her obsessive dreams. With a husband who builds for a living, Mary moves to the boom of Atlanta, where they live in a big old house with an unusual history, having served as a home for the blind. Very Didion-like, Mary attends the trial of the Atlanta child-murderer and, after that, afternoon matinees of schlock movies. But she warns, "If you're looking for the point, forget it." Not as mired in meaninglessness as she claims, Seese's sophisticated narrator shares a number of hard-earned insights ("Wives have time to stare out windows, and we have windows in every room"). If therapy can't connect Mary to her feelings, neither does her 65-year-old lover with heart troubles. After all, marriage is a headache for which there is no aspirin. A brittle first novel that amuses with every crack.
language: English
title: What Waiting Really Means
titlecomplete: What Waiting Really Means
genres: Fiction, Novella
ratings_count: 41
publisher: Dalkey Archive Press