Free Unless by Carol Shields

loneliness and insecurity.”
    These words hurt my feelings slightly, but then the reviews, good as they were, had subtly injured me too. The reviewers seemed taken aback that my slim novel (200 pages exactly) possessed any weight at all. “Oddly appealing,” the New York Times Book Review said. “Mrs. Winters’s book is very much for the moment, though certainly not for the ages,” The New Yorker opined. Tom advised me to take this as praise, his position being that all worthy novels pay close attention to the time in which they are suspended, and sometimes, years later, despite themselves, acquire a permanent lustre. I wasn’t so sure. As a long-time editor of Danielle Westerman’s work, I had acquired a near-crippling degree of critical appreciation for the severity of her moral stance, and I understood perfectly well that there was something just a little bit darling about my own book.
    My three daughters were happy about the book because they were mentioned by name in a People Magazine interview. (“Mrs. Winters lives on a farm outside Orangetown, Ontario, is married to a family physician, and is the mother of three handsome daughters, Natalie, Christine, and Norah.”) That was enough for them. Handsome! Norah, the most literary, the most mercurial of the three—both Natalie and Chris are in the advanced science stream at Orangetown High School—mumbled that it might have been a betterbook if I’d skipped the happy ending, if Alicia had decided on going to Paris after all, and if Roman had denied her his affection. There was, my daughter postulated, maybe too much over-the-top sweetness in the thyme seeds Alicia planted in her window box, and in Alicia’s listless moods and squeaky hopes. And no one in her right mind would sing out (as Alicia had done) those words that reached Roman’s ears—he was making filtered coffee in the kitchen—and bound him to her forever: “My thyme is up.”
    It won the Offenden Prize, which, though the money was nice, shackled the book to minor status. Clarence and Margot Offenden had established the prize back in the seventies out of a shared exasperation with the opaqueness of the contemporary novel. “The Offenden Prize recognizes literary quality and honours accessibility.” These are their criteria. Margot and Clarence are a good-hearted couple, and rich, but a little jolly and simple in their judgments, and Margot in particular is fond of repeating her recipe for enduring fiction. “A beginning, a middle, and an ending,” she likes to say. “Is that too much to ask?”
    At the award ceremony in New York she embraced Tom and the girls and told them how I shone among my peers, those dabblers in convolution and pretension who wrote without holding the reader in mind, who played games for their own selfish amusement, and who threw a mask of noir over every event, whether it was appropriate or not, who puta doorway, say, or a chair in every chapter, just to be baffling and obscure. “It’s heaven,” Margot sang into Tom’s ear, “to find that sunniness still exists in the world.” I was interviewed for television, sitting in a Vasily chair with a cat on my lap; someone, the director or producer, had insisted on the cat. Something to do with image.
    I don’t consider myself a sunny person. In fact, if I prayed, I would ask every day to be spared the shame of dumb sunniness. Danielle Westerman, her life, her reflection on that life, has taught me that much. Don’t hide your dark side from yourself, she said to me once, it’s what keeps us going forward, that pushing away from the blinding brilliance. She said that, of course, in the tough early days of feminism, and no one expected her to struggle free to merriment. I remember that I did feel, starting my mini-tour, the resident anxiety you develop when you know you’ve been too lucky; at any moment, maybe next Tuesday afternoon, I would be stricken with something unbearable.
    After the New York event, I said