Men-o-pause, a pause from men. Perhaps all women in long-term relationships should consider it.
When Joan Anderson wrote her memoir of marital separation in 1999, she was pausing a stagnant marriage to recharge and reorient, with no idea how it would resolve. She could not have known it would become a cult classic akin to Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea or that, nearly twenty years later, it would be made into an award-winning film starring Karen Allen. You can watch the trailer here.
Set in a primitive cottage on Cape Cod, this coming-of-age story, as she calls it, draws parallels between nature and the nature of women. It’s about the rip tides of life ebbing and flowing. It likens the seagrasses binding the dunes with their tremendous roots to women holding their families together. Sometimes, as with Lindbergh, it’s about shells: [A quahog shell] is like a woman who spends years holding her family members together, then becomes unhinged when they’re gone. It’s also about reinvention and the siren song of impulse, even when it beckons her to swim with the seals.
I personally don’t want to be shark bait, but maybe that’s just me. Yes, I was slow to embrace this story; it’s not like we all have a vacation home to escape to or the financial freedom. I feared it would be all yoga at dawn and chardonnay at sunset, but she brought me onboard by taking a job at a fish market in Chapter Three. From there, it got real and rewarding.
To hear more of Joan’s story, watch this interview.
