Still Me by Jojo Moyes
Jojo Moyes is my go-to when I want to read (listen to) something amazing to get back my passion for stories. This is the third book in the Louisa Clark stories, the first of which involved her being hired to try to convince a paralyzed man not to kill himself. In this novel, she’s moved to New York to be a paid companion to the young beautiful wife of a rich older man. She’s told the wife suffers from depression and it’s hoped that Louisa can help her out.
The strength of these novels is in the characters. Louisa is a headstrong woman with a fierce sense of loyalty who loves expressing herself through fashion. When she first meets Agnes, the woman she’s meant to work for, Agnes is an astonishingly beautiful young woman who has been swept up, Cinderella-like, into the impossibly rich world of upper crust New York, only to be shunned by her new peer group. She truly does love her husband, and he her, so it’s hard to see her treated so cruelly. But not everything is as it seems. Agnes has her own selfishness. Tabitha, Agnes’ new step-daughter, is incredibly cruel and snobby, and yet you can also see why she would be so angry. No one is in black and white here. People who are presented as nasty and unlikeable become likeable without completely losing all the traits that made them seem nasty.
Louisa and Sam, her boyfriend, are trying to do a long-distance relationship, and it’s hard. It’s not just hard because Louisa is attractive and there are tempting men around, or that Sam is attractive and there are tempting women around, but also because it’s hard for them to talk and when they do, it’s not the same as spending time together. Sam comes for a visit and there’s a day in which Louisa has to work all day, knowing that Sam is only in town for one more day. The tension of her wanting to spend time with him but being stuck at work will feel familiar to anyone who has been in the same position.
I suppose upper crust society exists so that people with too much money can punish themselves. The men work long hours and the women’s full-time jobs are to maintain their beauty. When they are not spending enormous sums of money to maintain too-big houses, they are conspicuously spending money on charitable events. Louisa, as Agnes’ companion, is between the two worlds. On Thanksgiving she has an invitation to eat at the doorman’s house, and she is invited to eat with Agnes, though Tabitha makes a stink about having staff (ie. not upper class people) eat with them. Louisa goes from a lifestyle where it’s acceptable to spend $3000 on a dress one wears only once to literally being homeless and having to go to the library to stay warm. We like to pretend that class doesn’t exist in America, so I applaud works that address it head on. Louisa is also shown this when dating Joshua. Joshua wants to be a millionaire before he’s 30, and to fit in among the high-rollers, he needs an appropriate girlfriend, one who fits in with that class, knows what to say and how to dress.
The other subject the book deals with is about sacrifice. What do women sacrifice to live the life they want? In Agnes’ case, it’s children. Her rich older husband has made “no children” a hard line item in their prenup. For Margot, the woman Louisa befriends, it was also children. Margot couldn’t have a child and also a career, and while she chose her career, she did deeply regret the eventual loss of her son. In Margot’s case, this regret is expressed through her attachment to her vintage clothes and accessories. A fashion career is what she chose, and knowing that she eventually paid for her choice with the family life she didn’t have, she can’t bear to part with the fashion because it is what she purchased with the loss. Her dog is her other treasure, and it’s telling and poignant when she is eventually able to give her dog up.
There were times in which Louisa made choices I didn’t understand, such as her reaction when she gets her first letter from Sam. The book didn’t end where I thought it was going. Usually, the story goes that a woman decides that she loves her man enough to give up her own life for him. Or she doesn’t (in the case of Margot) and she regrets that. This went somewhere else. I loved the romance and I loved the happy endings and I loved the rich tapestry of characters.
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