(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
What a liberating read Lucky Day by Beth Morrey is!
All of us, to greater or lesser extent, live ourselves constrained by a host of weird little social paradigms, spoken or unspoken rules by which we are allowed to act, speak or react, and while many are there for entirely sensible reasons such as smoothly functioning social disorder and just plain old-fashioned manners, there are other more toxic dynamics at work that leave us trussed like a pig about to go on a spit.
Who of us hasn’t wanted to tell an odious colleague that they are behaving terribly and should just shut the hell up? Or dreamed of telling a close friend or relative that their behaviour is abhorrent and they have made our lives a living hell for years uncountable?
Hands up, of course, we all have but we don’t because who wants to make a scene or having a metric of retributive corporate politics come raining down upon us?
None of us, really; the initial rush of saying it like it is is divine and the thing of heady dreams but once that has had its effervescent, mood lifting way, we are stuck with the consequences, and though all that truth telling is well deserved and bang on the money, being that blunt and angry may not always achieve the ends we think it will.
It’s not easy making a fuss. Standing up for yourself can be awkward and embarrassing. Causing a scene is mortifying. Saying no is hard.
But I think, finally, I might be getting the hang of it.
And yet, sometimes, we just crack …
That’s what happens to Clover Hendry one morning when she wakes up with a terrible migraine, pops some super strong painkillers and gets a nasty knock on the head courtesy of a fellow commuter’s briefcase, and finds herself in no mood to play it super nice anymore.
While she has a genuinely loving husband, who’s also rather winningly her best friend, and 16=year-old twins who are trying but not completely awful, and a job she mostly loves with a TV production company in Bristol, she’s bound up with unceasing, rampant anxiety about a host of things, grappling with an emotionally negligent mother whose narcissism knows no bounds, and strangers who she encounters in day-to-day life who don’t realise their own toxicity is making life miserable for those they encounter.
A meek and mild early-fortysomething who has always chosen quiet acquiescence over standing up for herself and all that resultant conflict, Clover is suddenly in no mood to take sh*t from anyone, and her newly-acquired bolshie attitude infuses Lucky Day with the glorious sense of release that can only come from unbridled honesty and utterances without concern for suffocatingly intense social convention.
Consequences be damned, Clover sets out to enjoy herself for once on her terms, walking out of work at 9.47am without telling anyone where she’s going or why, seeing that art exhibition she’s always wanted to see, and having a quiet lunch with colleagues demanding anything of her or family members pestering her for help.
It’s her day and she’s going to luxuriate in it, and you best leave alone.
But while there is a delicious Ferris Bueller’s Day Off feel to proceedings – Morrey herself acknowledges this in her rather fun acknowledgments section at the back of the novel – Lucky Day is also sage and thoughtful enough to know that when you finally pull the cork out and let the contents of your angry, exhausted soul spray out where they will, the results can be messy and not always completely free of consequence.
But that is, the delightfully humanistic side of this most wondrously honest and richly emotional and funny of novels; it has a great deal of mischief and exuberant je ne sais quoi with the idea of someone telling their usual life demands to go take a rather long and sustained hike, but it also acknowledges that you can’t do this without hurting others and so while Lucky Day is all kinds of liberating enjoyment, it’s also a great big emotional reckoning.
It’s that reckoning that happily consumes the final act of Lucky Day which indulges doing what our heart actually desires with gloriously reckless glee but which also has to clean up the mess it creates, especially the divulgence of all kinds of long-suppressed secrets which in the case of her toxically self-involved mother, won’t slip out of their familial Pandora’s Box without some real damage being done.
Lucky Day is nothing if not honest in just about narrative stroke, and that’s what warms you to the book, because it knows we need a release but that we will also have to clean up the chaos it unleashes.
Why did I think today would make a difference? That I could change, hone the skills I needed, prepare myself for this moment and turn it into a triumph? My luck ran out, and I have only myself to blame.
Still, as departures from the everyday fantasies go, Lucky Day is sheer wonderful bliss.
There’s giddy euphoria and raging anger, sadness and loss and woohoos aplenty, but most of all there’s a sense of being set free, of finally unleashing all those unsaid things and seeing where they land, which is a huge thing for Clover who has never handled letting the chips fall where they may very well at all.
She’s always held back and kept quiet, but while that buys short-term peace, it leads to long-term angst unhappiness and stress, and it’s those things, and some damn strong painkillers that send her off on her day of saying “f**k it!” to everyone and everything.
Sure, they create a raging mess upon their rush into the world around them, where they have previously been forbidden from going, but they also fix a lot of things that are broken, and as Clover counts the cost of her say of doing and saying whatever she pleases, she realises that she finally found peace and happiness on a host of things that previously left her pained and troubled.
So, score one for soul-freeing, heart-healing liberation, and zero for continuing to bottle it all up, and as you cheer Clover on, and long to see what would happen if you tried the same gambit yourself, you will hold Lucky Day very close to your heart, and who knows even your chest, because here is hope, here is possibility and here is an uplifting sense that you can finally tell it precisely as it is and survive to live, and thrive, another day in a far better place than you were before.