This Body
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Katherine Ashley, middle-aged wife and mother of two, dies in her sleep one night and wakes up a year later on the floor of a strange apartment in a strange city – and in a stranger’s body. This body she now inhabits is young, single and skinny. But Katherine has inherited not only Thisby Bennet’s lovely body but also her various addictions, her drug-dealing boyfriend, and the family she has disappointed and alienated for years. Finding herself unable to go home – her husband has, horrifyingly, remarried – Katherine lets her mothering instincts take over. She cleans up Thisby’s apartment, gets her scraggly hair done, and eventually kicks her habit. She also reconciles with the Bennets, who are so relieved to see Thisby clean and sober and with a decent hair colour that they ignore the fact that she is a different person – literally. As Katherine grows closer to the Bennets – particularly to fifteen-year-old Shakespeare-spewing Quince – she begins to understand that she has more in common with Thisby than hir body. and when her own family shows up in her new hometown, her fear that it wasn’t just Thisby’s life that was awry is realized, as the connections between her mind and body begin to go haywire. A delightful act of literary ventriloquism, This Body explores the yin and yang of love and lust, of the mind and the body, and of second chances and chances long past.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
This is an unusual story about Katherine a middle-class married woman with two teenage children who dies and reawakens one year later to find herself in the ravaged body of ‘Thisby’ a young drug addict. Katherine has to cope with Thisby’s drug addiction, her family, and her drug-pushing boyfriend. She also has to contend with the fact that her own husband has remarried. She takes Thisby’s younger sister Quince under her wing. Later in the book she becomes an alcoholic, sleeps with Thisby’s brother Puck, gets pregnant, has an abortion, and meets up with her original family who only see her as Thisby, the alcoholic. The storyline had great possibilities. I felt disappointed that Thisby’s family was very wealthy. It would have been more challenging for the author had Thisby come from a poor family already involved in drugs. I felt the character of Katherine becoming Thisby was incredible in that the author made the transformation too easy. Katherine considered herself a control freak, Thisby was hedonist. Even allowing for the fact that Thisby had a personality change, one would imagine that the way Thisby spoke would have been different. Thisby’s family had a strange obsession about Shakespeare – especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Katherine seemed to pick up on Shakespeare very fast. Katherine” obsession with her own family was tiresome. The seduction of Thisby’s brother and subsequent abortion seemed more like an excuse to add to the story than a real possibility that the character of Katherine would do that. This author had an interesting idea, which didn’t quite work. I admired her courage in attempting the topic. (Member of Raheny Library Reading Group)
This is a very well constructed novel , with a connecting thread linking the 1920’s , 1940’s and the 1990’s . The mental torment which afflicted Virginia Woolf and her subsequent suicide have an influence on the life of Laura Brown , a young wife and mother in 1940’s Los Angeles . Both Virginia Woolf and Laura are torn between love of family and a mental illness which craves freedom . Laura may have found a way of escape but in doing so has left a sensitive and devoted son to cope with the consequences – insecurity and unsatisfactory relationships . It is Julia , a girl of the 90’s with a ” numbered test tube for a father ” who is in control of her life and presents an air of certainty . All characters in the novel are well drawn . I found it a compulsive read and I hope it will emerge as the eventual winner. (Member of Raheny Library Reading Group )