Quick thoughts on Unless by Carol Shields
“The wind is blowing and blowing. I am still I, though it’s harder and harder to pronounce that simple pronoun and maintain composure.”

I came upon this book by recommendation of a list on the Guardian that is too embarrassing to name here. It’s not a typical read for me as I mostly lean towards nonfiction or science fiction stories, but it captivated me enough that I finished it in less than a month. (Considering that I finished Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of Dutiful Daughter in almost three months, this is quite a feat for me)
It has been a while since I read a book that had so many quotes I could relate to. Unexpected, because the plot itself is far from relatable to me.
Carol Shields’s Unless tells the story of Reta Winters, a middle-aged mother of three who is a writer/translator in a suburban town in Canada whose daughter decided one day to sit out on the pavement with a sign that said ‘goodness’ hanging around her neck.
Despite an apparent shock to the incident, Winters and the rest of her family initially went out of their way to compartmentalize their emotions and lived on their day as usual — something that I could oddly relate to.
One particular passage talks about that silent pang you feel when you were still grappling with a loss months after the pivotal event, yet everything else outside of you appears to move on. It touched me so deeply that I read it over and over again.
“I wonder sometimes if we have all — Tom, Natalie, Chris, Lois — become actors in Norah’s shadow play, if in these last few months we’ve turned wary, guarded, angered, waiting to be given back what we once had, each of us frozen to the bone and consigned to a place where nothing ever changes (…)
But that’s not true for life outside of our house. I look around and I see all kinds of changes, some of them astonishing.”
Bonus, another one of my favorite passage that I’ve partly used as a caption for a photo on Facebook:
“I believed these visitation of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness.
But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glasses you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it’s smashed, you have to move into a different sort of life.”
