(courtesy Hachette Australia)
While this book is not set at Easter, it carries themes of redemption and renewal, and of love and connection which surely are at the heart of this most redemptive of seasons …
If you ask most people, they would tell you that they are very nicely connected, thank you very much.
They have family, they have friends, they see the same faces on their morning commute or at the shops; they know people and are known.
But as the beautifully told and warmly and humourously written novel Friends of Dorothy by Sandi Toksvig empathetically underlines, we may not be as connected as we think, and more importantly, as we need to be.
Take newly married couple, Amber and Stevie.
Garrulous, thoughtful Ambie is a paramedic, charged with caring for people at a truly terrible point in their lives while Stevie, all plans and strategy, and not a little anxiety, is a policewoman, her role on the frontlines of society exposing to some pretty terrible stuff.
They have parents, sure but they don’t see them all that often but they have each other, their marriage proof that they have what they need to make a truly warm and connected life that matters; add to that list, Stevie’s BFF since childhood, Jack, a closeted gay man who is yet to come out to the grandmother who raised him for fear she may not love him back anymore.
It’s a lovely social bubble and they seem happy in it.
‘Do you have any family?’ Amber asked.
Maybe it was the postcard, more likely it was the cot. The three women sat there as slow tears fell down Dorothy’s face.
But then something quite extraordinary happens when they move into their new home on London’s down-at-heel Grimaldi Square – no, no one is sure which Grimaldi it’s tamed after but there’s a few to choose from – which is supposed to be their sanctuary, their idyll, their place to draw close to each other and make a life.
They discover, or rather Stevie does, that there’s an old woman on a red couch upstairs in one of the rooms, a woman who it turns out sold them the house and who, though she is 500,000 pounds richer, has no plans to vacate the house that she technically no longer owns.
Stevie isn’t sure what to do with Dorothy (hence the name of the playfully titled novel) whom the backcover blurb perfectly describes as a “foul-mouthed, straight-talking, wise-cracking [seventy-nine-year-old], and while she wants to chuck her out on the street without ceremony or interrogation, Amber is more inclined to find out why someone would stick around in a home they no longer owned.
Dorothy is tightlipped on that front but one thing that emerges quite quickly is what a force of nature and a delight Dorothy is; though she is clearly scarred and haunted by some past trauma, she is also ferociously unafraid of life and difficult people, and much of the inestimable charm of Friends of Dorothy is letting yourself enjoy the unalloyed ballsy joy of the titular character.
She may enrage Stevie and bemuse Amber and she may have a ton of very reasonable questions to answer, but she is a delight on a thousand different fronts, and like Amber and Stevie, who eventually come to see her as family, you will embrace her as part of your heart too.
(courtesy Curtis Brown)
Friends of Dorothy is a novel, if you haven’t twigged already, about the treasure that is found family.
Whether you have a wonderful birth family or one that should be flushed down the toilet of life with nary a second thought, this is a novel that celebrates the endless joys of finding your people and having them find you, no matter how unusual the circumstances, and how the meeting of disparate souls can change everything for the better.
Now, you may have, like this reviewer, have read a ton of these novels; bookshop shelves are crowded with the genre and understandably so since they reassure you that it is possible to find the depth of connection and love we all need to avoid feeling marooned and lost in life.
But there’s something about Friends of Dorothy that suggests Toksvig knows a thing or two about what it is to find your life and have your life changed; it’s likely the same sensibility that many LGBTQIA+ people, many, if not all of whom, have found themselves on the emotional outer and in a need of tribe to call their own which will give a damn about them when so many others don’t.
There’s a real warmth and loveliness to the novel, and while there’s also a great deal of honesty about how brutal and hard life can be, ultimately what prevails is how connection saves us when nothing else will.
Dorothy reached out and took her hand. Stevie clung on and finally allowed the tears to come. Despite her own pain Dorothy managed to get herself out of the chair and onto the bed. Then she reached for Stevie and gently pulled her into her arms. In the dark Stevie cried and Dorothy rocked her as she soothed the monsters away.
The family that coalesces around Dorothy, Stevie and Amber, quite unwillingly at first but then with speed and a fervent enthusiasm, is the kind we all need – it’s inclusive, supportive, forgives mistakes and elevates acts of great kindness and love, and it changes the circumstances of our lives, even those parts that we might not recognise need some care and attention.
It’s an unalloyed joy reading as Dorothy, through sheer force of will and a need to meddle when it turns out she’s exactly needed – her friend, and Jack’s grandmother, Birdie, affectionately accuses Dorothy of interfering but that doesn’t dissuade her friend from always riding in where angels fear to tread – changes a whole host of lives and how these people, in turn, end up rallying together to help change hers.
That’s what family does, right, and that’s what Friends of Dorothy celebrates in ways big and small, nuanced and boldly epic, humorously and with appropriate seriousness, and with a writing style that deftly steps from sparkling humour to sober seriousness and back again without once putting a foot wrong.
Friends of Dorothy is all the joys and happiness and warm hugs in the world, and even though it acknowledges how cold the winds may blow and how dark things may get at times, it never once loses its faith in the power of found, or as Toksvig rather winningly puts it, “logical” family, and how the connectedness it brings can change things powerfully, truly and in ways that makes everything good in ways we never could have imagined.