Hood by Emma Donoghue - Sex~Kitten.net

Several years past I spent some time in a bookstore on Seattle’s Capital Hill, the gay friendliest part of town. I was on the lookout for some lesbian fiction, something to help me find out what being gay was all about. I chose Hood because it was about a teenager’s love of a fellow student, something I’d dealt with myself, though my situation was far different as my love interest had known nothing of my desires. I was also sucked in by the setting, Catholic Ireland, which I somehow likened to my own setting, Catholic Household of German-Italian descent.

When I first flipped eagerly through the pages, I admit I was mostly eager to take in the sparse love-scenes. I concocted personal images of fingers on skin, lips on hardened nipples and tongues lapping through moistened folds. I managed to make it through all 309 pages in record time, mostly for having skipped large chunks to find more salacious talk of two women grinding against one another.

I somehow managed to lose my personal copy of the book and didn’t give it much thought until I recently saw it on the shelf at my local library and picked it up. I remembered the excitement of reading those spicy scenes, but this time was more taken in by the promise of a story of love and loss.

Hood is the tale of Pen O’Grady, a thirty year old woman whose girlfriend, Cara, has just died in a car crash. It follows Pen through an entire week, from getting the phone call about the untimely demise, through the funeral and days beyond as she returns to work in a world turned upside down. It is filled with inner dialogue and liberal use of flashback of the days of their first meeting to the time just before Cara’s death.

From the beginning we are given a good sense of the type of girl Cara had been. Her desire for freedom and constant flight from the clutches of Pen to both men and other women is well played out. The story doesn’t cause outrage at Cara’s infidelity but justifies it delicately (That was one of the best days, the day she came back after the first time. If she hadn’t left, it occurred to me now, there would not have been the sweetness of her coming back.) and unapologetically. I find this to be one of the most remarkable things in Donoghue’s work here as it would be so easy to draw Cara out as a poor, unworthy partner. We don’t have to reprimand Cara for her infidelities and neither does Pen, Cara seems to do that best on her own (“You know,” she drawls, “we’d get on so much better if you had the guts to hate me a little.”)

What hit me hardest in the novel were the descriptions of Pen trying to come to terms with the loss of a partner she has been with, on an off, for thirteen years. I started to imagine how life would be if I’d lost the one thing I was ever sure of. I started to get emotionally involved in Pen’s sorrow; I started to mourn the eventual loss of my partner (though, in all my hopes and dreams, that won’t be for al least another 70 years) and feel how empty the days would be. The best and most heartfelt descriptions were in the narration of Pen’s grief during the days after Cara’s death (When I woke up the next morning I couldn’t’ remember Cara’s face. I lay still for several minutes, calling up my store of images, but they had been robbed in the night.) and at the funeral (I looked up now at the wooden box under the flowers, and told myself that Cara was inside. But I didn’t believe a bit of it...Last time she came back she promised she’d never go away for good without asking or at least warning me, giving me something to hold on to.)

The novel is narrated with beauty and careful consideration. Donoghue manages to keep the reader on the same emotional levels as her characters so that we feel the same sense of loss, desire, anger, sadness and avoidance within each page. The words are poetic brilliance and leave us with a novel that is emotionally charged and filled with the true complexity of relationships and life. The back cover’s write-up expresses it best, “Above all, a graceful tale about coming to terms with loss.”