I read Amongst Women a few days ago, and I still can’t get the quiet out of my head, the kind of quiet that sits between people who love each other but don’t know how to show it.
The house in this book feels like a world that’s shrinking, everything happens around Moran, and yet nothing really happens. There’s something uncomfortable about how normal it all feels. The way people just keep adjusting, keep forgiving, keep orbiting around one person’s moods.
It’s not dramatic. it’s exhausting in a very familiar way.
Moran isn’t a character you hate. He’s worse. he’s someone you recognize. That one person in the family who controls the tone of every day without even saying much. And the book never tries to justify him or fix him. It just leaves him there, and you’re forced to sit with it.
There’s a line in it (I’m paraphrasing) about how love can turn into habit, and habit into duty. That hit me harder than I expected. It made me think about how most families survive not on affection, but on rhythm the daily repetition of care, resentment, and silence.
When I finished it, I didn’t feel sad. Just… aware. Like someone had quietly pointed out the small cracks that have always been there.
“He wanted to be loved while he was alive and obeyed when he was dead.”
From John McGahern’s Amongst Women
Amongst Women. It’s not loud. It just stays. I don’t even know why it feels so heavy, maybe because it’s too close to how people actually are. The words move slow, like people talking in old Irish rhythm, simple but sharp. Nothing really happens, but something in it keeps echoing.
