Book Review of "The Story Hour" by Thrity Umrigar.
Originally published in the Ohioana Quarterly
Every week on her day off, Lakshmi takes two buses across town to Maggie's house where, for an hour, the two women sit in Maggie's home office. They sit as patient and doctor, they sit as friends, and they sit trying to make sense of the other's story, eventually learning to take nothing for granted about each other. Author Thrity Umrigar brings us to this intimate crossroads of culture, personality, and psychology in The Story Hour, in which Lakshmi, an immigrant from India who tried to commit suicide, tells Maggie, a psychologist assigned to her case, her story.
Maggie and Lakshmi are worlds apart. In Lakshmi's eyes, Maggie has a perfect life that includes weekly visits to the pool, a loving husband who is a passionate and dedicated professor, and a house that sits on a hill in an enviable neighborhood. Lakshmi, appearing first to Maggie as a helpless and innocent victim of circumstances, is in a loveless marriage with a husband whose nickname for her is “Stupid” and who brought her to the United States promising more than he had to give. Lakshmi works long hours for no pay in her husband's restaurant and lives in the cramped upstairs apartment. Before meeting Maggie and before attempting suicide, Lakshmi passed miserable days in the restaurant hoping to see one of her regular customers, a kind and courteous man she believed to be her best friend, although their interactions were limited to what took place in the restaurant. It was his departure to California that pushed her to attempt suicide.
Slowly, Maggie begins to bring Lakshmi into her world by allowing, and occasionally demanding, that she become more independent from her husband. Maggie teaches Lakshmi how to drive and helps her find work as a cleaner and caterer with her upper-crust friends. During the story hour, Lakshmi and Maggie begin to see the things they have in common despite the surface differences: both lost their mothers while still young and both had challenging childhoods mired in poverty, confusion, and hurt. Both had to face the challenges that accompany a woman as she grows. Both are still coming to terms with decisions they've made and those that have been made for them. Both are married to Indian men and have personal connections to the subcontinent—connections that are disrupted and reinforced throughout the novel. Driving the book, and our heroines' relationship, are the moments when each woman begins to understand that the other is not as she seems.
From this hour, an uncertain and tenuous friendship blossoms. This is a friendship in which each woman can see herself in the other, which is sometimes reassuring and sometimes challenging. It is a friendship that Maggie fights for fear of violating her code of ethics, but also one she nurtures against her better judgment because she knows that, more than anything, Lakshmi needs a friend. It is a friendship that Lakshmi walks into willingly, almost forcefully, upon seeing that Maggie's husband appreciates her cooking and that her own marriage improves because of Maggie.
At its core, The Story Hour is a story about stories: the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell others, the ones we hide, the ones we wear, and the ones we come to believe or not.