Are You Looking For Your Third Door?

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

It was kind of like my funeral. “How did you know the deceased then?”. Except this wasn’t a bunch of mourners balancing a cup of tea and a traybake in a draughty church hall. This was a group of women sitting round my table eating M&S crisps and drinking dealcoholized sparkling rosé which I was struggling to say every time I offered someone a glass of it.

I’m not sure who started the ball rolling, taking turns to reveal how they knew me while I was still alive to enjoy this, even adding why they’d turned up at my pop-up book club to review Ann Napolitano’s fourth novel on a grim Thursday evening in November. One had ‘discovered’ me through a mutual friend. “She’s a connector,” she said. And when I looked it up, it said, “you can always catch a connector mingling and introducing one friend to another”. Another who wasn’t sure whether to disclose her professional identity had come across me on Zoom during the pandemic at what sounded like an extremely mysterious underground meeting. She’d been intrigued because I’d said Hello Beautiful was “the best book I’d read this year” and I realised I’d read it in June when there was still quite a bit of the year to go.

Another had been told that “she must meet Deborah Sloan”, but we were yet to get to the bottom of exactly why. Something in common seemed the most obvious conclusion seeing as we never seemed to run out of things to talk about. She remembered the lovely lady she’d met at not-the-last-Pop-Up-but-the-one-before. I couldn’t remember what book we’d discussed then and whether it was Claire Keegan or Claire Kilroy, and so I made a mental note to avoid Claires from now on. But it prompted me to check in with the lovely lady the next day and she hadn’t been able to come because her son was preparing for the SEAG tests to determine his post-primary future and I felt her pain as I’d been there and I was glad to be well past the trauma of academic selection activities, and I sympathised as women do. And a fourth had never seen me in the flesh before. We’d ‘met’ on Instagram and her twin daughters were concerned about her turning up at this stranger’s house. “How do you know she’s who she says she is?” they said.

I have a lot of romantic notions about book clubs like everyone will come every month and we’ll all become each other’s confidants, and be deep and meaningful as we sip Bollinger, and someone will make a film about us set in a beautiful terrace in Notting Hill with Crittall windows and a massive kitchen island and endless cushions and a mahoosive coffee machine but in reality, it’s not like that. Life gets in the way of consistency and there will always be a collection of last-minute cry-offs and instead of sick relatives, I wish people would just say, “it’s January and I don’t want to go outside”. So, I’ve abandoned regularity and now I pop up three times a year and give months of notice about what book to read. I’ve learned to cope with “I’d love to come” becoming radio silence and now I just say I have no idea who’s coming because there’s a world of difference between the 3pm intention and the 7pm action. And small numbers work best anyway because then there’s no desperate vying for attention and trying to get a word in edgeways and I bring my list of questions I’ve printed off the Internet, knowing it’s not really the book we want to talk about, it’s ourselves.  

“We're all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is,” said Hello Beautiful and we all unanimously agreed that there was something special about this story of the four Padavano sisters, ambitious Julia, dreamer Sylvie, free-spirited Cecelia and Emeline, the peacemaker, who takes on the role of caring for everyone else. And maybe it was because it dealt with the complexities of human existence, imperfect parenting, the struggles that come with giving up your dreams to raise the next generation, mental health, illness, childhood trauma, divorce, loss, grief and the fact that family is not just the one we are born into, but also one that can be chosen. Ann Napolitano said she wanted to write a version of sisterhood that was as natural as it was complicated, as full of love and intimacy as it was hurt and betrayal, and I thought about what Sam Baker¹ said about why the sisters in Bad Sisters² are so compelling:

“They are living, they are laughing (a lot), they are having breakdowns, they are grieving, they are shagging, they are cheating, they are being cheated on, they are trying to conceive, they are trying not to, they are fighting with their partners and their siblings, they are being overlooked for promotion, they are taking their menopause coach to their sister’s wedding as their plus one, they are plotting murder and then covering it up”.

And I thought about my own four daughters, the four sisters I am responsible for, and their love and their hate and their solidarity and their separateness and how my best moments are when they are in sync with each other and my worst when they at war with each other and we discussed the mystery of how those born of the same parents, raised in the same home, sharing the same blood can become adults who are so entirely different from one another. 

But it was the third doors and what Sylvie believed about them that got us talking most. At her father’s funeral, Sylvie remembers the last time she’d been alone with him. As they’d sat on the back steps of a shop, waiting to collect their grocery order, Charlie had said, "It's because you know that more is possible that you’ll always see the pointlessness in following a stupid rule or clocking in and out of a boring class. Most people can't see that distinction, so they just do as they're told. Of course, this makes them bored and irritated, but they think that's the human condition. You and I are lucky enough to see that it doesn’t have to be that way”.

When most people contemplate their options in life, he told her, they only see first or second doors. These represent conventional life choices. They go through a series of predictable entrances and exits. They follow a typical pathway. They clock in and out. They never choose their own path.

“The priest was talking about Charlie, trying to make his job sound important, trying to make it seem like Charlie had run his household… Sylvie ached at how this priest and all the people at the wake defined Charlie with his biographical facts, when he had been so much more… He was his acts of kindness, and his love for his daughters, and the twenty minutes he’d spent with Sylvie behind the grocer’s that evening. That conversation had helped Sylvie understand herself in a new way. She looked for third doors because she was like her father. Julia sought to collect labels like honors student, girlfriend, and wife, but Sylvie steered away from labels. She wanted to be true to herself with every word she uttered, every action she took, and every belief she held”.

And so, we considered what our third door might look like, was it quitting something to do something else, was it leaving one career to try another, was it like Sylvie, boycotting boring classes to read in parks, not settling for less than true love, finding the soulmate who becomes part of your DNA, your bones, and your skin. And someone said I’d opened my third door because I’d given up a job and I’d started to write.

And as they were saying goodbye to the new friends they’d made on the grim November evening, I asked was Hello Beautiful the type of book they like to read and they said yes, they wanted to read about life and it was like what Camilla Long said about reading, that she wanted to “nestle into a café window seat with a cup of coffee and contemplate my womanly existence”³. And I thought about how I’d like to please Camilla Long and I was currently scoping out my novel and it would be set in 1999 in the six months leading up to the millennium bug and there would be lots of women in it, like the twenty-something who suddenly feels validated because she has acquired a boyfriend with a Nova and the thirty-something whose husband is always talking about year-end and the forty-something who is desperately trying to please her mother and the fifty-something who can no longer look at herself in the mirror. And I hoped no one would notice that these were all versions of me.

And what I’d understood was that finding your third door wasn’t about doing something specific, it wasn’t about going through an unexpected or alternative door or changing direction. It was about seeing the world in a new way. It was about seeing yourself in a new way. Leaving the job was just the stimulus. The third door was knowing yourself.

1. Sam Baker

2. Bad Sisters

3. Camilla Long