Anxious People Book Club

 

Book Clubs are such interesting places to study people and actually get a glimpse inside their heads. Especially if you’re in a club that doesn’t just blow off the discussion while asking if there’s more Pinot Noir and mini quiches. Although there is something to be said for drunk-fun discussions but usually they quickly leave the realm of reading and enter a zone where few people remember what was said the next day. I’ve never been in a book club that paired our discussions with wine or food so I may have been too heavily influenced in my perception by movies like The Book Club staring Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda and Candice Bergen whose characters decide to read Fifty Shades of Grey series. Oh my god, if I see another ‘Old Lady’ movie here I’m going to throw up. Can we all spell “Stereotype?” The role models for building those stereotyped movie characters seems to be The Golden Girls TV show. But wrapping up the point of this paragraph: if you google “wines to serve at book clubs” you’ll get the impression they all do it. 

And back to the topic of stereotyping senior women in movies. Stereotyping people often works in comedies because there must be enough truth in the stereotype to ring bells in our brains. Many of us can say, for example, that we’ve known someone like Blanche in the Golden Girls who is ‘adventurous’ if not down right promiscuous and perpetually horny. Most of us probably know more Dorothy types---blunt, strong-willed and grounded in reality, or genuine and naive people like Rose, or like Sophia who mostly lives in the past. My problem with the Old Lady movies is that’s ALL they show. My peer group of older women is broader than just four personality types. We do have our Sophias, Dorothys and Roses but I’d be hard pressed to find a Blanche among us. In fact if the word ‘sex’ has even been muttered in our hallowed halls I haven’t heard it. Except for that time when animals were humping in a documentary and one of the guys was being a guy about it. We have a least five additional types of older women living here that can’t be stereotyped the way Hollywood likes to portray us.

There used to be a game going around where you had to figure out which character we thought we and the others playing the game were most like in the TV series Friends. I’d get Monica (because I’ve always been detail picky) or Phoebe because I could also be an airhead living in my fantasy world. Don would get Chandler most often. If we played it today using Golden Girls I’d say I was most like Blanche because I’m strong-willed, but at different periods in my life I’ve been all those characters. I was as naive as Rose in my 20s for example. And this and the paragraph above it have absolutely nothing to do with book clubs so it’s time to wrap it up.

The book we discussed in club this month was Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. He also wrote the first book our club discussed back in November, A Man Called Ove. I thought that one was the most boring book on the face of the earth until the midway point when it started getting mildly interesting. Had I not pushed through it because it was a book club choice I would have stopped reading after the first 100 pages. That’s what book clubs are good for---pushing you out of your comfort zone. And my comfort zone was saying I’d never read another Backman book, but there I was last month doing just that. Or rather there I was listening to it on Amazon’s audible. Most in the club loved Backman’s first book and didn’t warm up to this second book. I was just the opposite. 

Book club was kind of ruined this month by a woman who decided she wanted to see what we were doing. She sat next to me and I’ve had encounters with her before so I’d love to be able to show compassion to her, but she drives me and others crazy. At best I manage a cool tolerance of her. She’s had a couple of strokes and she never stops talking. She talks fast and always about herself and she had a lot of opinions about the book she hadn’t read.

Later that night half of our book club sat around our dinner table and had a great book discussion. We all was of the same opinion about Chatty Cathy. It’s hard to say without knowing her before her strokes but having been around a lot of stroke survivors I’m guessing she has impulse control issues which is why she can’t quit talking at inappropriate times. Our book club has two retired college professors and four retired grade school teachers so they have major league skills in dealing with people who want to dominate the center of attention but even so we’re all worried about the future of our group if she continues coming. In the past we’ve had wonderful, insightful and deep discussions that I’ve looked forward to. Stay tuned next month to see if that holds true. We’ll be discussing Detroit: An American Autopsy. ©