Description
“I’ve got a job,” I told Adam.
“Good for you. I can now relinquish all responsibility for this household then?”
“And I can save up for a divorce.”
“So, let’s celebrate,” said Adam.
Discovered by three of Scotland’s most celebrated writers, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and Liz Lochhead, when they were visiting a local writers’ workshop in the late 1970s, Agnes Owens—then in her 50s—claimed she’d joined the group just to “get out of the house.” She had grown up in a working-class family outside Glasgow, done badly at school, and had worked in factories, as a cleaner, and as an occasional typist. When she published her highly acclaimed first novel at the age of 58, it launched a most unexpected literary career.
Nowhere is Owens’s black humor and attention to the surreal banalities and frustrations of ordinary existence better showcased than in her third novel, A Working Mother. Our beleaguered heroine is Betty, beset by her depressed, alcoholic war-vet husband Adam and their smart-mouthed kids. Neither an affair with Adam’s attractive friend Brendan (a disappointment), nor her new job as a typist (for a leerer with roving hands) can lift her out of the rut. Is it any wonder she’s taken to the bottle now too?
Endorsements
“A mordant, cautionary tale about a working-class woman hemmed in on all sides, written by ‘the most unfairly neglected of all Scottish authors’” — Alasdair Gray, author of Poor Things.