An exquisite and profound tale for fans of Anne Tyler and Anna Quindlen
Glowingly reviewed everywhere from O, The Oprah Magazine and Good Housekeeping to sites across the blogosphere, Lydia’s Party sparks “a-ha” moments and heartfelt conversations about friendship, regrets, and ambitions. Margaret Hawkins’s earlier books, all published by small presses, have gained her a devoted following, but this gem of a novel will introduce her to the wider audience she deserves.
Lydia is hosting her “Bleak Midwinter Bash,” a late Christmas party that has become an annual tradition. Her guests—six friends who bonded twenty years ago over art, dogs, and their budding careers and romances—think they know everything about one another, but tonight Lydia prepares to shock them with a devastating announcement.
An exquisite and profound tale for fans of Anne Tyler and Anna Quindlen
Glowingly reviewed everywhere from O, The Oprah Magazine and Good Housekeeping to sites across the blogosphere, Lydia’s Party sparks “a-ha” moments and heartfelt conversations about friendship, regrets, and ambitions. Margaret Hawkins’s earlier books, all published by small presses, have gained her a devoted following, but this gem of a novel will introduce her to the wider audience she deserves.
Lydia is hosting her “Bleak Midwinter Bash,” a late Christmas party that has become an annual tradition. Her guests—six friends who bonded twenty years ago over art, dogs, and their budding careers and romances—think they know everything about one another, but tonight Lydia prepares to shock them with a devastating announcement.
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Overview
An exquisite and profound tale for fans of Anne Tyler and Anna Quindlen
Glowingly reviewed everywhere from O, The Oprah Magazine and Good Housekeeping to sites across the blogosphere, Lydia’s Party sparks “a-ha” moments and heartfelt conversations about friendship, regrets, and ambitions. Margaret Hawkins’s earlier books, all published by small presses, have gained her a devoted following, but this gem of a novel will introduce her to the wider audience she deserves.
Lydia is hosting her “Bleak Midwinter Bash,” a late Christmas party that has become an annual tradition. Her guests—six friends who bonded twenty years ago over art, dogs, and their budding careers and romances—think they know everything about one another, but tonight Lydia prepares to shock them with a devastating announcement.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780670015764 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/23/2014 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.20(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
MARGARET HAWKINS is the author of two previous novels and a memoir. She is a Senior Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hawkins lives in Chicago.
What People are Saying About This
Praise for Lydia's Party by Margaret Hawkins:
“With shades of Mrs. Dalloway, much of the novel takes place in a day, as Lydia prepares for her annual winter party. . . . Hawkins’s novel is beautiful . . . and the plot takes a number of unexpected, hugely enjoyable turns. It is this kind of book: the kind one buys extra copies of to pass out to friends.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“Sumptuous . . . a repast that’s alternately uncomfortable and soothing, weepy and jubilant, evocative and realistic. Party host and art teacher Lydia is having her annual dinner for her women friends. . . . In a quirky, impossibly magical and sweetly charming twist, Lydia helps guide them all to forgiveness.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Hawkins’s protagonists are well drawn and interesting.”
—Library Journal
“Like Carol Shields’s Larry’s Party, a completely winning book about friendship, an elusive and almost never written about subject, which makes this a rare achievement.”
—Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce and Flyover Lives
“Lydia’s Party is a brilliant story, so perfectly told, the characters instantly recognizable and unforgettable, that they take up residence in one’s heart. It is destined to be a classic for this generation.”
—Jo-Ann Mapson, author of Solomon’s Oak, Finding Casey, and the forthcoming Owen's Daughter
“Lydia’s Party is a literary celebration of dark secrets, enduring friendship, and the slow crawl of regret. A luminous reflection that will linger long after the last page, Margaret Hawkins’s latest novel will make you examine what and whom you hold most dear while you savor each perfect sentence.”
—Sally Koslow, author of The Widow Waltz
“With wit and insight Margaret Hawkins gives us a sharp, soulful look at love and regret, women’s friendship, art, aging, and ambition, and what it means to live a life. At once funny and moving, Lydia’s Party is a pure delight.”
—Rilla Askew, author of Fire in Beulah
“Hawkins’ third novel is a beautiful evocation of a death at midlife—at once elegant, melancholy and wise.
With shades of Mrs. Dalloway, much of the novel takes place in a day, as Lydia prepares for her annual winter party. The same group of women has been coming for years (except Norris, who makes barely plausible excuses), and Lydia worries over the usual: the food, the wine, the weather. But this will be her last party; she’s just been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and has but a few weeks to live. She struggles over a letter she plans to give each friend after dinner; a letter she writes and edits and is dissatisfied with because how can you explain all the disappointments of a lifetime in an uplifting farewell? She teaches art at a community college in the suburbs of Chicago, but really she wanted Norris’ life. Years ago, Lydia and Norris were colleagues, but thanks to Lydia’s mentorship (and, admittedly, Norris’ own icy determination), Norris has become a world-renowned painter while Lydia gave up long ago. And Lydia had men, too many of the wrong kind. And she had fears of making the wrong choices and so made too few important ones. And now she knows it is too late for anything; there is no more time to be the person she imagined. As she prepares for the party, her guests get ready as well: Elaine is bitter and alone and spreads acrimony like ruined pixie dust; still beautiful Maura loses herself in reveries of Roy, the married man she devoted her life to for a once-a-week “date”; Celia is married with a teenage son but is perpetually surprised that family life is so tedious. And then there is Norris, whom everybody hates but Lydia, and even Lydia hates her a little bit, too. Hawkins smartly continues the novel after the party, after Lydia’s death, after Norris begins a grand portrait series of the women, and the plot takes a number of unexpected, hugely enjoyable turns.
It is this kind of book: the kind one buy extra copies of to pass out to friends.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
"It's a good time of year for a party" (p. 106).
Chicago winters are notoriously long, but for almost twenty years come January Lydia's friends have gathered for a cherished ritual and blow-out evening. Their host's annual party offers them good food, wine, and a much-needed dose of conviviality on what often "turned out to be the coldest night of the year" (p. 4). Only tonight, Lydia is preoccupied with something other than her famed spicy chicken stew.
Now fifty-four, Lydia was once an aspiring painter who taught art classes to pay the bills. After her position at a suburban community college became permanent, Lydia gradually let teaching replace creating. Two decades pass, and suddenly-or so it seems to Lydia-her artistic dreams are likely on permanent hold, her romantic life is complicated, and she is no longer even "the woman who looks incredibly young for her age" (p. 6).
As Lydia prepares the feast, she contemplates the expensive French cooking pot she'd impulsively purchased. "She felt a little guilty. The cost, including overnight shipping, would have fed a family of four for a week" (p. 12). Yet, having lived frugally all her life, she is now determined to pursue frivolous indulgences. After all, these days she finds herself living with her ailing dog, Maxine, and her ex-husband, Spence, a down-on-his-luck musician who inhabits her basement rent-free.
Later, over a table overflowing with a cornucopia of food and wine, and with the enormous Maxine warming their feet, the women revel in sharing gossip and secrets while also laughing uproariously at past party exploits. Several of the women are artists, and their friendships are complicated by ambition and jealousy. All the women are pondering their lives and wondering "what's next?" now that they are no longer young enough to easily attempt reinvention.
Bound primarily by friendship with Lydia, tonight's partygoers are a potluck mix of personalities and backgrounds. Norris is a wealthy, internationally renowned painter, while Celia struggles to stay financially afloat. Jayne is happy in her stable marriage, but Betsy feels disconnected from her husband. Elaine has lived free of romantic entanglements, whereas Maura is defined by the twenty-one years she spent as her boss's mistress.
Not all of them are looking forward to the night's festivities, however. Norris knows that the others dislike her abrasive personality, and some of them resent her success. "What they didn't know . was that she was nicer to them, or at least to Lydia, than she was to almost anyone else" (p. 52). She drives to Lydia's, certain that this year's party will be her last.
With wisdom, humor, and compassion, Margaret Hawkins chronicles the lives of seven women at midlife and the looming events that will force them to rethink their futures alone and together. A mesmerizing meditation on the vicissitudes of aging, the transformative power of art, and a stirring paean to female friendships, Lydia's Party will resonate long after the final page.
ABOUT MARGARET HAWKINS
Margaret Hawkins is the author of two previous novels and a memoir. She wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times and is a Senior Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Chicago.
A CONVERSATION WITH MARGARET HAWKINS
What inspired you to write Lydia's Party?
I was thinking about the complications of close-knit groups-families and old friends-and how they relate to one another over time. It's about love, of course, but not only. There are these other currents, privacy versus transparency, the challenges of individual expression versus being a good citizen. I started the book in January, so that's where that came from. Really, surviving winter in Chicago, year after year, is a kind of psychological odyssey, reminding you at every turn that you're going to die. Even in summer, you know what's coming. Perversely, I suppose, I find that kind of invigorating.
Besides being a novelist, you are an art critic and lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. How do your "day jobs" inform your fiction?
Everything informs my fiction - doing the laundry, walking my dog. The art part is just what I'm interested in so the themes in the novel and the jobs are both an outgrowth of that. Of course, it's also true that after writing a weekly column about art for years I've seen a lot of inadvertently humorous press releases and couldn't help poking some fun. The teaching part is drawn somewhat from life-that's how you think when you teach: how am I going to get and hold attention without being gratuitously theatrical? -but the details are from my imagination. I've never given a lecture on Ivan Albright. Specifically, in terms of this book, I'm intrigued by how artists relate to the world at large, how they think of themselves and justify the lives they (we) lead. I mean, is it really all right to lock yourself in a room and spend your days painting pictures or writing stories? I hope so, but sometimes I wonder.
Your descriptions of Norris's paintings are incredibly vivid. Are they based on the work of a real-life painter or did they spring wholly from your imagination?
They pretty much spring from my imagination. The figure paintings are what I might like to paint if I could. But it's like teaching; making up ideas for paintings is a lot easier than making actual paintings. I admire good figure painters, especially when they do something new with the genre. It takes a lot of guts to fly in the face of art history.
Did you ever have a List of Fears, as Lydia does?
Not exactly but when I was in seventh grade I had a teacher who started the year by asking us a battery of personal questions. We had to write down the answers and turn them in. One of the questions was: What are you afraid of? We were supposed to make a list. I don't know if he was just indulging his curiosity or if it was school policy and this was some kind of "modern" technique to better understand children's psyches but I remember loving that exercise. It was thrilling to me for some reason, to be invited to contemplate, then name my fears, and for years I went over the list in my mind, adding and subtracting items. I can't remember much of it now but I do recall that the first item was big black dogs. Which is funny because my childhood dog had been medium-sized and black, and when I got to be an adult the dog I got was as big and black as you can get. So I gave that paradox to Lydia. I kind of like that it doesn't make obvious sense. Maybe the power suggested by such a dog is an aspect of herself she feared?
Who are some of your literary influences?
I guess your deepest literary influences are what you read and loved when you were a child up to about fourteen or fifteen so mine would be A Wrinkle in Time, Alice in Wonderland, Oliver Twist, Lolita, the Bobbsey Twins, East of Eden, Edith Hamilton's Mythology. For years I went to a Baptist church with my friend Debbie so I read the Bible. And my father pressed boy books on me-I don't think he thought much of books by or about girls -so I read Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island. Everything I read influences me, though. I love newspapers.
As the novel progresses, the focus seems to shift from Lydia to Norris. Why is that?
I'm intrigued by the way people who are close to one another, especially people who are sometimes adversarial, seem to trade personality traits over time. You see it in couples, sometimes when they break up. And it happens when people die, the surviving friend or partner or offspring will take on traits of the person who's gone, traits they didn't even like, without knowing or intending to. It's a kind of immortality. I thought Lydia was passing the baton to Norris, even though she didn't mean to, like it was Norris's turn to do some of the unsung work in the world now. She's just getting started at the end. I didn't plan that exactly; it just seemed to be what the story needed, a kind of opening out into the ambiguous future. Maybe, also, the book ends with Norris because a life story doesn't end when someone dies. The story gets passed along to other people, to make something more from it. There tends to be a belief that the passing on of a spiritual inheritance is only a family matter-books often end with the next generation picking up where the older one left off-but it happens among friends, too, and that's almost more poignant because the time is shorter and there's less recognition for these relationships. Friendship doesn't hold the same glorious position in the public imagination that family does.
You do a wonderful job of chronicling the varied experiences of each of the women as they maneuver middle age. Are these characters based on real-life women of your acquaintance?
No! But the dog, Maxine, is. She's based on my late dog Max (the big black one). He was wilder, though.
How did writing this novel affect your own feelings about growing older?
I think I was working out some stuff. I feel better now than I did when I was writing it.
What are you working on now?
Another novel, of course. Also, I just finished an essay for Katherine Ace, a painter who revisits Grimm Brothers fairy tales, and I'm starting one for my friend Richard Loving, an amazing painter who is about to celebrate his 90th birthday the same week his new show opens.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS