(courtesy Hachette Australia)
For all the talk of “it takes a village” and laudatory proclamations about the power of community, there remains this sense that somehow we need to muddle through on our own terms and not trouble anyone else.
Quite where this individualistic drive to not bother anyone with our troubles comes from is a mystery, especially since we live in an age where therapy has been mainstreamed, groups like Men’s Shed have normalised seeking emotional support from others and wearing your heart of your sleeve has become almost a mandatory hallmark of online interactions.
And yet, for all that, we stay very firmly in our lane, worried that if we admit to weakness or fallibility that somehow that will be the damning of us as a person, even by those we know closely and love deeply.
In Libby Page’s delightful warm hug of a novelistic love song to family, friends, community and belonging, The Lifeline, we meet two key people, new mum Kate (who you will know from Page’s first novel, The Lido) and mental health nurse Phoebe, who find out over the course of the book that baring your soul and connecting meaningfully to others is not a failing but a towering and life-affirming strength.
They all sound like lovely, feel good things to acknowledge and feel and why would anyone not rush to embrace them, but the truth is that being that vulnerable is never easy, something that these two remarkable women know only too well.
Rosie has started to cry again, but Kate does her best to smile, shifting her arms to try and find a position that feels more natural. It’s only when Jay shows Lydia out that Kate lets the frozen smile melt away from her face. She only realises the effort it had been taking when she doesn’t have to do it anymore.
It’s this willingness to admit to life’s dark and troubling moments that always grounds Libby Page’s novels so beautifully.
Sure, they are all the warm and wonderful things in the world bundled into stories that warm the heart and restore the soul, and they do leave you feeling energised and hopeful, but the path to holding all those good things in your hands is a difficult one and Page, for all the feel good energies emanating from The Lifeline doesn’t pretend otherwise.
This novel, possibly more than most (though, of course, only Page herself can attest to this), is drawn from the author’s real life experiences as a new mum which, far from matching the bright and shiny brochures of sparklingly perfect and blissfully loved-up motherhood, were as dark and worrying as it’s possible to get.
But it’s tough to admit to so much vulnerability when the overwhelming new mum orthodoxy is that you bond instantly and fall head-over-heels in love the moment you first hold your baby, and Page empathetically pours her time in the emotional wilderness of being a new mother into the person of Kate, who, apart from the arrival of three-month-old Rosie, is struggling to adjust to her self-chosen new life in rural Somerset, far from the lights of London and her journalistic career. (The career is only temporarily on hold and it proves pivotal to the way the story of The Lifeline unfolds.)
She’s even reluctant to tell her endlessly supportive husband Jay that she feels like she’s failing as a mum, and it’s not until she joins a river swimming group with an hilariously inclusive super long name that she is emboldened enough and alive to life sufficiently again to finally admit she feels a million miles away from the poster girl for mothergood.
She’s not alone in carrying the burden of thoughts and feelings she dare not utter.
Phoebe is running on empty, in life and in her career, and while she’s fantastically devoted to the patients in her charge, she is helping self-sacrificially from a point of complete and total near-exhaustion; she’s also got her hands full with relationship and family concerns and wonders why she’s going to keep all the balls in the air when she doesn’t think she’s got the strength to juggle anymore.
At her lowers point, she stumbles across the same river swimming group that Kate finds, a group of women who are quirky, honest and funny and who become the very titular lifeline that Kate and Phoebe and who, in turn, find themselves coming alive in wholly unexpected ways as they close friendships with their two newest members.
Driven by an unrealised need for community and belonging – getting by on your own terms becomes so habitual for many of us that we forget how good it can feel to have people loving and supporting us – Kate and Phoebe become close friends, bond incredibly closely to the women of the swimming group and come alive again to all the myriad possibilities life offers.
Phoebe smiles to herself, remembering Sandra saying that to her the first time they met.
They get changed quickly and then race each other down to the water. her dad reaches out for her hand and they run like that into the waters.
The forming of this new found family, which extends and grows in ways that warm the soul and embolden the spirit, and which acknowledge how tough mental health issues can be – thus while we get the fairytale-level happy outcomes you expect and want from a Libby Page novel, it’s hard won and feel true and real and emotionally honest – gives The Lifeline such a boisterous sense of love and belonging that you cannot help but vibrate with glee as these broken people not only find hope but also a renewed sense of purpose.
Perhaps the biggest lesson to emerge from The Lifeline is that while we toss around hackneyed phrases like “no man is an island”, we don’t always embrace community like we should and that need to do that because it just makes so much better.
Going through life at all is hard, but near impossible alone, and while Kate and Phoebe are struggling along just enough as The Lifeline opens, they aren’t really ALIVE, and it’s not until they become part of the river swimming group and form close bonds with people who change their lives for the better, that they really rejoin the best and most connected parts of the human race again.
The Lifeline is a joy because of its reminder to be connected, to be known, to be emotionally honest and vulnerable and to never fear being close to others because far from judging us, they can often be the ones who unconditionally love and embrace and who help us reinvent who we are and where we want to go on a life journey that suddenly seems so much more alive and possible.