I finished reading The Woman Behind the Door today. It’s Roddy Doyle’s second book featuring Paula Spencer, the protagonist in his earlier work titled, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors.

Paula is a 60-something recovering alcoholic. A survivor of a brutal marriage, the details emerge slowly and in broken pieces as we are made privy to her inner dialogue. Later, we witness the complex interchanges between Paula and her eldest daughter, all while her ongoing inner dialogue offers context and layers of complexity.

Paula’s life, on the face of it, could be called a messy failure. She’s well aware of that fact, thank you very much. Her reminiscences are harrowing and often steeped in festering shame. But she’s resilient, too, and her voice frequently takes a turn, crackling with humor and ‘feck you’ bravado. And then the book also offers glimpses of a middle ground where gentle insights emerge and you can catch your breath briefly.

I resonated with many things about Paula and also about her daughter. On the Paula side of things, I’ve no trouble feeling regret and shame about any number of episodes in my life. At this stage, I’ve gotten better at maintaining perspective (unless I’ve felt called to ‘wallow’ for some unfathomable reason). On the daughter side of things, I have sometimes wondered how I’d have reacted had my mother lived longer, worked out her issues, and wanted to be an actual mother to me. Would I have accepted? Trusted? I think it would have been very very hard. And kudos to Roddy Doyle for laying this out in all its mundane detail and painful complexity.

One of the insights that Paula has in the course of the novel is that she can ‘play the long game.’ What this means, essentially, is doing nothing. Simply letting events unfold without trying to affect them. Sometimes it meant not speaking but sitting in silence. At its base, it meant that Paula was not reacting in the moment. Whatever happened next would not have Paula’s fingerprints on it.

This is a high-level challenge for me, as I grew up with a hearty, and not unreasonable, fear of ‘whatever happened next.’ It was a knee-jerk reaction for me to try to affect events — whether that meant bringing something to a head or trying to deflect with distraction or humor.

What I absolutely could not bear was to let things unfold. I thought I knew where they were heading, and interceding in some way was the only option that made sense to me. It felt like survival depended on it.

As you might imagine, the persistence of that habit into adulthood has been very unhelpful. And that’s why I appreciated Roddy Doyle introducing (or reintroducing) the long-game idea.

And yet, it’s SO challenging to tolerate! It feels like I’m leaving myself powerless. And yet, it is powerful.

It’s so simple. It requires no effort at all. Just sit on your hands and don’t mess about with events.

The long game. I’m learning to play it.