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A review by maedo
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
5.0
When you have been the other woman or been other-womaned almost exclusively in your relationships, you begin to think that the world is Mad Men. That it is impossible to satisfy men by being just you within the strictures of a monogamous, hetero sort of relationship, and all it will take is a convenient narrative -- which may or may not be the truth -- told to an open-minded woman over a drink at the bar or on a run to the store to grab bread to find yourself in the crazed mind of one who is being wronged and who knows it, but doesn't know it.
I appreciate Silver Sparrow tremendously because it tells the story of the Other Woman in a way that shows, unsentimentally, how the Other relationship still affects the primary relationship when the primary relationship is yet blissfully untouched. How it creeps up on the seams of the "happy home life", always threatening to permeate. Tayari Jones' Other Woman story takes it a bit further: here the husband has another family, a daughter born and a mother married to legitimize the child. He visits them under the guise of "work." Jones captures well the slow torment of the second daughter, hating that she is the other and kept secret, and the surprising envy of the first relationship's child, who is not as beautiful as the second daughter, once their paths intersect as the second daughter is "surveilling" the first. The story is told initially from the perspective of the second daughter, who knows she is second all her life, and switches from her perspective to the first daughter's at the point she meets the second, who can sense that her new friend is keeping a secret from her. Painfully, only the reader knows how it is going to break her heart.
In terms of the Other Woman herself, I felt a mixture of anger and sympathy. Anger because her complicity in the affair and then desire to marry hurts a family and because she talks openly about her and her daughter being more beautiful than the first wife, which is nasty. But also sympathy, because when she met her future husband she created a narrative about his relationship (that it was not a good one, because he bought his wife a knife as a gift, and who does that in a good relationship?) that legitimized her actions until they were irreversible. Those who've been in her place to some degree or another can understand how easy it is to rationalize your behavior by these narratives, especially when they are reinforced.
He means to leave her.
She knows and it's OK, their romance is gone.
They didn't marry for love anyway.
In the hands of a less capable writer, this book could have devolved easily into soap opera. In the hands of Tayari Jones, it is perfect.
I appreciate Silver Sparrow tremendously because it tells the story of the Other Woman in a way that shows, unsentimentally, how the Other relationship still affects the primary relationship when the primary relationship is yet blissfully untouched. How it creeps up on the seams of the "happy home life", always threatening to permeate. Tayari Jones' Other Woman story takes it a bit further: here the husband has another family, a daughter born and a mother married to legitimize the child. He visits them under the guise of "work." Jones captures well the slow torment of the second daughter, hating that she is the other and kept secret, and the surprising envy of the first relationship's child, who is not as beautiful as the second daughter, once their paths intersect as the second daughter is "surveilling" the first. The story is told initially from the perspective of the second daughter, who knows she is second all her life, and switches from her perspective to the first daughter's at the point she meets the second, who can sense that her new friend is keeping a secret from her. Painfully, only the reader knows how it is going to break her heart.
In terms of the Other Woman herself, I felt a mixture of anger and sympathy. Anger because her complicity in the affair and then desire to marry hurts a family and because she talks openly about her and her daughter being more beautiful than the first wife, which is nasty. But also sympathy, because when she met her future husband she created a narrative about his relationship (that it was not a good one, because he bought his wife a knife as a gift, and who does that in a good relationship?) that legitimized her actions until they were irreversible. Those who've been in her place to some degree or another can understand how easy it is to rationalize your behavior by these narratives, especially when they are reinforced.
He means to leave her.
She knows and it's OK, their romance is gone.
They didn't marry for love anyway.
In the hands of a less capable writer, this book could have devolved easily into soap opera. In the hands of Tayari Jones, it is perfect.