The protagonists, young wives and mothers who meet on a playground in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1967, are likable and realistic. Frankie, the narrator, is a traditional Catholic girl from Chicago. Kath is the stereotypical Southern belle. Linda, caustically blunt, lost her mother to cancer as a child. Brett has a computer-like brain and a penchant for white gloves. Ally is a quiet, secretive woman who joins the group the day Robert Kennedy is shot. Each is firmly committed to raising happy children and supporting her husband’s career.
Still, as they get to know each other, they discover that they all have other, more personal dreams as well: When Brett announces that her sis ter wants to be a surgeon, and that she herself had dreamed of becoming an astronaut, the women “burst out laughing, even Brett—we were getting a little tipsy. I thought for a moment she must have been kidding about her sister, too—a girl surgeon! But she wasn’t kidding about any of it, you could tell by the sudden look in her leaf-bud eyes, all shaded and down-looking and watery even as she laughed.”
The Wednesday Sisters, as they call themselves, share a love of literature, and they eventually decide—ironically at a Miss America party—to begin a writing group. Unsurprisingly, this commitment to themselves turns the act of writing into a kind of subversive consciousness-raising device, and they become intoxicated by the sound of what might be called their own true voices. As Frankie notes, “I suppose what we did was park our butts down and write any moment and any place our children were otherwise occupied. We got up early and wrote while our households slept. We carried journals and pens and even manuscripts in our purses, and if the children fell asleep in the car on the way to the grocery store, we sat with our writing propped up against the steering wheel, scribbling quietly, careful not to inadvertently honk the horn.”
Their writing and friendship sustain them through the national and personal traumas ahead, although not always in ways that 21st century women would accept. One of the most bittersweet, and most successful, aspects of The Wednesday Sisters is that Clayton keeps the characters consistent. Sure, they go to peace and women’s rights rallies, and they rail at the system, but Clayton knows that even full-scale emotional revelations are rarely followed by a full-scale rejection of everything you’ve ever been. Though all their hopes aren’t realized, the friendship these women share provides a haven for each one anyway—and for the readers of this novel.
Meg Waite Clayton reads at Davis-Kidd Booksellers at 7 p.m. July 16.
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