Author: Claire Alexander
Year published: 2022
Category: Adult fiction
Pages: 368 pages
Rating: 4 out of 5
Location: (my 2024 Google Reading map): UK
Summary: She has a full-time remote job and her rescue cat Fred. Her best friend Sadie visits with her two children. There's her online support group, her jigsaw puzzles and favorite recipes, her beloved Emily Dickinson poems. Also keeping her company are treacherous memories of an unstable childhood and a traumatic event that had sent her reeling.
But something's about to change. First, two new friends burst into her life. Then her long-estranged sister gets in touch. Suddenly her carefully curated home is no longer a space to hide. Whether Meredith likes it or not, the world is coming to her door...
Review: The author did a really good job of showing what it is like to have social anxiety and to have it go so far that you get stuck in your house. Once it's reached over 1,000 days how do you change and go back outside? What has to happen to cause someone to stay in and (mostly) avoid the world?
These questions are all dealt with deftly in this novel. Meredith is a likable character and doesn't seem totally weird, which I think is important. She socializes with a few people who come to her house and interact with her (from the grocery delivery guy to her best friend). So she isn't totally unsocial. There is just a bunch of stuff that happened to her that led her to stay home. And that stuff is revealed slowly throughout the novel.
Meredith's relationship with her sister figures quite large in this story. Why are they estranged, can they reconcile, and what will it take to make that happen? Meredith uses therapy, her own strength, and her friendship with a visiting volunteer to gain the strength to go outside and rejoin the world.
Challenges for which this counts: none
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