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First Published:
Apr 2005, 320 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2006, 368 pages
Few writers have explored, as Kidd does, the lush, unknown region of the feminine soul where the thin line between the spiritual and the erotic exists.
The luminous new novel from the author of the phenomenal bestseller The Secret Life of Bees.
Sue Monk Kidd’s stunning debut, The Secret Life of Bees, has
transformed her into a genuine literary star. Now, in her much-anticipated new
novel, Kidd has woven a transcendent tale that will thrill her legion of fans
and cement her reputation as one of the most remarkable writers at work today.
Inside the abbey of a Benedictine monastery on tiny Egret Island, just off
the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately
carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid
before her conversion. Jessie Sullivan’s conventional life has been "molded to
the smallest space possible." So when she is called home to cope with her
mother’s startling and enigmatic act of violence, Jessie finds herself relieved
to be apart from her husband, Hugh. Jessie loves Hugh, but on Egret Island—amid
the gorgeous marshlands and tidal creeks—she becomes drawn to Brother Thomas, a
monk who is mere months from taking his final vows. What transpires will unlock
the roots of her mother’s tormented past, but most of all, as Jessie grapples
with the tension of desire and the struggle to deny it, she will find a freedom
that feels overwhelmingly right.
What inspires the yearning for a soul mate? Few writers have explored, as
Kidd does, the lush, unknown region of the feminine soul where the thin line
between the spiritual and the erotic exists. The Mermaid Chair is a vividly
imagined novel about the passions of the spirit and the ecstasies of the body;
one that illuminates a woman’s self-awakening with the brilliance and power that
only a writer of Kidd’s ability could conjure.
February 17, 1988, I opened my eyes and heard a procession of sounds: first
the phone going off on the opposite side of the bed, rousing us at 5:04 a.m. to
what could only be a calamity, then rain pummeling the roof of our old Victorian
house, sluicing its sneaky way to the basement, and finally small puffs of air
coming from Hugh’s lower lip, each one perfectly timed, like a metronome.
Twenty years of this puffing. I’d heard it when he wasn’t even asleep, when he
sat in his leather wing chair after dinner, reading through the column of
psychiatric journals rising from the floor, and it would seem like the cadence
against which my entire life was set.
The phone rang again, and I lay there, waiting for Hugh to pick up, certain
it was one of his patients, probably the paranoid schizophrenic who’d phoned
last night convinced the CIA had him cornered in a federal building in downtown
Atlanta.
A third ring, and Hugh fumbled for the receiver...
Kidd was born and raised in the tiny town of Sylvester, Georgia. Her writing has been deeply influenced by place, and she mined her experiences of growing up in Sylvester when she wrote she mined her experiences of growing up in Sylvester when she wrote teachers, who described her as a 'born writer', she detoured into nursing ('partly due to a failure of courage and partly due to the cultural climate of the South in 1966') during her twenties. However, in her thirties (now with a husband and two children) she felt the pull to return to writing and enrolled in a writing class. One of her personal essays written for class was published in Guideposts Magazine and reprinted in Readers Digest, and ...
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