The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd, a controversial yet truthful look at a woman's self-discovery

This book came at an apt time when I was finding answers for myself, finding out what led me to some situations. Maybe it was mid-life crisis or maybe it was a symbol for something within me that is setting to burst forth. Or something I refused to face. Maybe it’s my love for writing which I re-directed to something else.

I saw this book on my way out the grocery store. I was on my way home with the grocery bags on my cart on the way down to the parking lot. I don’t know what came over me and I looked back at the stack of magazines lining the entrance of the store like there was an unseen hand tapping my shoulder or a passing thought that I had to heed.

Then I noticed some books below it. It was beside The Hours of Michael Cunningham and below the magazines. The one that caught my eye here was the word Mermaid. I love anything to do with mermaids, I even have a mermaid cap pen. Then I read the blurb on the back. A married woman in love with a monk and her moment of self-discovery. That sounds interesting though I was apprehensive because the cover looked like it was from a YA book. But still I bought it without even reading a single sentence since it was bound in plastic. I don’t usually buy books without reading a paragraph or two just to have a feel of an author’s style of writing. So this was a risk. But I placed it on my shopping cart and hoped that this was not a dud.

I was relieved. It wasn't. I loved the stanza from Pablo Neruda’s poem on the opening page.

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:

I love you as one loves certain dark things,

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

Then I read parts of the Prologue and sighed. I was glad. I closed that book for a while and wondered if this book was a message from above. Something that provided some answers I was dealing with my life at that moment. Something I had to deal with since I would be turning forty soon.

But more than that, reading the book also made me revisit those feelings of love again. The feeling where everything was heightened, every color vibrant and the shade of the blossoms of a fire tree more vivid in the summer sun. And the giddiness that bursts forth within you and the expanding warmth in your heart when your beloved looks at you.

 Like this excerpt from the book.

He turned toward me, and we stared at each other for several seconds. In the sharp light of the moon, I noticed that his eyes were pale blue and his face deeply tanned. There was an irresistible look of boyishness about him, but something else, too, that struck me as serious, intense.

“Brother Thomas,” he said, and I felt an odd catch in my chest.

“I’m Nelle’s daughter, I replied. “Jessie Sullivan.”

Later I would revisit that encounter again and again. I would tell myself that when I met him, all the dark little wicks in the cells of my body lifted up in the knowledge that here he was – the one you wait for, but I don’t know if that was really true, or if I only came to believe it was. I’m sure I’ve burdened our first meeting with too much imagining. But I did feel that catch in my chest; I saw him, and something happened.

 one of the mermaid picture cards I keep,
by Lord Frederic Leighton  (1830-1896)
The Fisherman and the Siren

Yes, falling in love does give you an ecstatic high like being addicted on a certain drug. But what if falling in love with that someone was not right? When you are married and he has his sacred vows. The plot seems reminiscent of The Thornbirds where a woman fell in love with a priest but no this book is far from it. I read the former in high school and it was more titillating than enlightening. In this book, the woman falling in love with the monk meant something. It led to an awakening. I will talk about that later. 

Below is an excerpt I also liked, a part where the protagonist grappled with her feelings for Brother Thomas, just shows you that strong emotions like love is not easy to deal with because sometimes it creates conflict within you :

“Max, what am I going to do?” I said. “I’m falling in love…..I didn't now how to stop feeling what I felt. To shake the idea that here was a person I was meant to find. It was not just the man who excited me – it was the sky in him, things in him that I did not know, had never tasted, might never taste perhaps. Right then it seemed almost easier to live with the devastation of my marriage than the regret of living my life without ever knowing him for sure, without flying through a red sky or a blue sea.

And one interesting part in the book is when some of the protagonist’s friends discussed about their experience in falling in love with the most unlikely people, what happened when they acted on it and when they did not.

“First of all, you don’t have sense when you fall in love,” said Kat. “And no one here’s judging you. Not in this house anyway. Lord knows you won’t see me throwing stones. I've been exactly where you are”

“I’m just saying I know what it’s like to love somebody you think you shouldn't be loving,” Kat went on. “There probably isn't a woman alive who doesn't know what that’s like. Half of them fall for their gynecologists and the other half for their priests. You can’t stop your heart from loving, really – it’s like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.

But you’ve got to hear this too,” Kat added. I wish now I hadn't acted on those feelings. There was a lot of hurt caused, Jessie….I’m only saying I know what you’re feeling and that you should think this through.”

“I was already divorced by then and wouldn't have minded remarrying, but he had a wife already. Kat is right, that didn’t stop me from feeling what I was feeling. I decided, though, to love him without…you know, physically loving him, and it was hard, about the hardest thing I ever did, but I lived to be glad about it. The thing is, he got me exploring my roots, and so much came out of that.”

Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898). The Depths of the Sea

Reading those lines confirmed something that I've learned now that I’m older. You can fall in love a couple of times in your lifetime. Of course, there are those who claim that they only fell in love only once in their life but I guess there are some people like me who may have a different experience. I believe that each time you fall in love, it’s different because you're a different person each time, the first time maybe you were young and naïve then the next time a little older and hopefully more wiser. But the irony sometimes is while you already know the highs and the hardships of falling in love and have realized that the initial blush of love can fade off after a few months or years yet you can still fall in love like it’s the first time and get this rush of emotions.

In the book I also liked that the thoughts of the other characters were also made known to the reader. In this excerpt, we have the thoughts of the monk, Brother Thomas.

It had set off a longing in him that had not diminished as he’d hoped but had grown so acute he couldn't sleep some nights thinking about her. He would get up then and read the poem by Yeats about going out to the hazel wood with a fire in one’s head. Yeats had written it after he’d met Maude Gonne, a woman he’d glimpsed one clear day standing by a window and fallen hopelessly in love with.

Thomas had felt increasingly foolish about it, at how enmeshed he was in wanting her. As if he’d been snared in one of the monastery’s own cast nets.

And then that one innocuous moment: this woman getting to her feet in a garden without flowers, her face dark and beautiful, and turning to him with light daubed around her head. It had shattered his deep contentment, the whole perfect order.

He felt her even now like something returning, flooding around him like the hidden waters where he swam.

Then we can also hear the thoughts of Hugh, Jessie’s husband, a psychologist as he rationalizes the affair.

Over and over he’d come across the same idea – not the least bit unfamiliar to him – that when a person was in need of cataclysmic change, of a whole new center in the personality, for instance, his or her psyche would induce an infatuation, an erotic attachment, an intense falling-in-love.

He knew this. Every analyst knew it. Falling in love was the oldest, most ruthless catalyst on earth.

But typically you fell in love with something in yourself that you recognized in the other person, yet couldn't grasp what Jessie had seen in this supposedly spiritual man that could capture her so profoundly.

And just as you thought that the lead character, Jessie would end up with the monk and live happily ever after, a sudden change of heart happens. She realizes why she fell in love with Brother Thomas and what attracted him to her and that she misses her husband.

I think beginnings must have their own endings hidden inside them. Gazing at Whit, I knew that the end had been there the first night we met, back when he stood on one side of the monastery wall and I on the other. The sturdy bricks.

We stood there staring at each other. I wondered if I would’ve fallen in love with him if he’d been a shoe salesman in Atlanta. It was a bizarre thought, but it seemed somehow the most sensible thought of my life. I doubted I would have, and it was disillusioning to me in the sense of stripping away the last remaining illusions. My falling in love with him had had everything to do with his monkness, his loyalty to what lay deep within him, the self-containment of his solitude, that desire to be transformed. What I’d loved in him most was my own aliveness, his ability to give me back to myself.

It felt cruel and astonishing to realize that our relationship had never belonged out there in the world, in a real home where you wash socks and slice onions. It belonged in the shadowed linings of the soul.

I had come to the irreducible thing, just as I had with my father, and there was nothing to do but accept, to learn to accept, to lie down every night and accept

.

I closed my eyes, and it was Hugh I saw. His hands, the hair on his fingers, the Band-Aids on his thumbs. How real all that was. How ordinary. How achingly beautiful. I wanted him back. Not like before but new, all new. I wanted what came after the passion had blown through: flawed, married love.

Howard Pyle (1853-1911). The Mermaid

I guess it’s easy to cast stone over this story, to think of it as one of the usual mid-life crisis story. But it’s not. The falling in love of Jessie and Brother Thomas meant something, it became a spark to re-awaken themselves from their own internal slumber. For Jessie, it was to re-awaken her repressed passion about her art and for Brother Thomas, it was about facing life again instead of hiding in the monastery after his wife and child was killed in an accident. Their meeting and falling in love gave them courage to face what they were running from or repressing in their lives.

However, just like any infatuation, however great it may be, it had to end. Jessie realized that what she had with his husband was more enduring because it survived the fading of the heady excitement of the first months or years of love. It had already reached a more mature level, one that blended well into a stable domestic life. And I think that is what a great love is, the everyday commitment of just being there for each other, of having each other’s back through the years and creating memories and unique traditions for the family.

And aside from this realization, what I really liked about this book was Jessie's moment of self-discovery, her realization that she only belonged to herself not an extension of any man. Because sometimes, a woman becomes too identified to a man, her father, her husband, her lover that she loses her own identity, her own sense of self. Though, her affair had been devastating to people around her and is never justified, it unearthed a part of herself that she lost along the way. I liked that part.

All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I’d tried to complete myself with someone else – first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn't want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.

I sorted through the cotton strands, wondering if something in me had known what must be done even as I’d collected them.

I stood still with the waves cascading against my thighs, elongating as they flowed beyond me toward the shore.

Jessie, I take you, Jessie…

The wind moved sideways past my ears, and I could smell the aloneness in it.

For better or for worse.

The words rose from my chest and recited themselves in my mind.

To love and to cherish.

I took the longest string and tied a knot in the center of it. I gazed at it for a minute, then flung it into the ocean at roughly one o’clock in the afternoon, May 17, 1988 and every day of my life since, I return to that insoluble moment with veneration and homage, as if it possesses the weight and ceremony of marriage.

I’m glad to have read another work of fiction that made me sit through it and finish it again because I have a lot of half-read nonfiction and fiction books littered on my table, my cabinet, my bag. I'm happy to have read this before embarking on the next part of my journey in life. Maybe turning forty does make you more reflective J

Honestly, I haven’t read Sue Monk Kidd’s more popular The Secret Life of Bees but reading Mermaid Chair makes me want to one of these days. I found her on Twitter and I think she lives by the sea in Florida. She often posts pictures of the sunset setting in the ocean and I tell myself wow, what a great way to live, writing near the ocean. I hope I can also do that someday.

Anyway, this post has been a long time coming. There have been a lot of emotional upheavals within me lately and I’m slowly recovering from it and this book has helped me somehow J