Book review: 'The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year'

Book: The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year
Author: Sue Townsend
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 437
Price: Rs499

Eva is a housewife, married to Brian, an unattractive and insensitive astronomer. On the day that their prodigy children, Brian Junior and Brianne, leave for university, Eva locks the door and disconnects the phone. After momentarily gazing at a Heinz tomato soup stain on a chair, the cover of which she spent months embroidering, Eva gets the soup from the kitchen and upturns it on the chair. Then, she climbs into bed, fully-clothed, and stays there for a year.

How tired do you have to be to stay in bed for a year? Eva is the quintessential desperate housewife, beaten down by the exertion of being married to a man she fell out of love with “eleven minutes into the wedding ceremony”. Her children, a twin set of maladjusted geniuses, are unable to deal with anything outside of the confines of a classroom. The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year is an attempt to explain how Eva has been subdued by the daily grind of keeping this dysfunctional family running, all the while losing sense of who she is as an individual.

This is revealed to the reader by the confounded reactions of those around her. Brian is melancholic at the loss of his hot dinners. Eva’s mother, Ruby, is unsympathetic: “She’d soon get out of bed if her arse was on fire.” Eva grapples with more basic questions: how does the microwave work? Why are there so many buttons on the TV remote control? Does the family owe the electricity company money, or vice versa? The exposé of Brian’s six-year-long affair and the twins panicked responses to an attention-seeking classmate are the background noise to Eva’s self-imposed solitude.

Soon, news spreads.  Eva’s fame follows a familiar trajectory: news articles, TV shows, adoring crowds under her window. A chapatti with a burnt patch reported to have a startling likeness to Eva’s face is christened “the blessed chapatti” on Radio Leicester. Twitter hashtags her as #womaninbed. Believers throng to her bedside, looking for answers to repressed homosexuality, suicidal feelings and gambling addictions. Eva is overwhelmed, and her only refuge at this time is the kindly, dreadlocked Alexander, a handyman who undertakes the job of taking care of her daily needs.

All the characters — family, friends, spectators, and eventually even the besotted Alexander — confess themselves unable to understand Eva. But they all feel the pull of this act of rebellion. Eva rejects her own life, and though she can think of no better alternative than to pull the covers over her head, this simple retreat from convention turns out to be enough to destabilise not only her family, but perfect strangers. Sue Townsend approaches threateningly gloomy topics like infidelity, depression and the slow death of sexual tension with her trademark humour, which doesn’t require a single joke to be cracked.

One of the first to come to Eva for help is a woman who has been brutally beaten by her husband. Eva urges her to shut her eyes and imagine a house without him. She shuts her eyes for so long that Eva thinks the woman has fallen asleep. But when she opens her eyes, she quietly begins to do what she needs to do to get rid of him. Throughout the book, Townsend explores the power of the imagination to conjure an alternative to what is accepted as ‘normal’, even if it’s all done while lying in bed.