Whoa! Hester’s dad was a truly abusive jerk, but she often minimizes it, suggesting others have had it much worse than she did. After her parents divorced, things improved in her life, but she never was socially secure with others. She had one friend in high school, May. Her mom died when she was 18. Her dad was out of her life after the divorce and largely she had a death wish for him. Eventually Hester went to law school, landed a cushy job in a huge corporate law firm and made tons of money. She is very sex driven and sleeps with her building super. And then, on her 40th birthday, Hester is diagnosed with breast cancer.
And all she wants to do in this world is drive her Jaguar to California and kill her father. For real. So, she heads off from New Jersey, and along the way, she visits her long ago ex, Caleb in Pittsburgh. for a quick and weird reunion. She picks up a hitchhiker, John, who is an environmental activist visiting superfund sites across the country and photographing them. She agrees that as long as they generally head west, she will go along with him to his various sites. Thus, we begin the heart of the story. A road trip of two very different souls but two very odd people. Hester has no sense of what it means to feel things other than anger, perhaps. She has bizarre thoughts about doing very odd, sometimes self-destructive things and sometimes does them. The story is told completely from her perspective, so we watch her gain awareness of a self, of who she is, that she is more than the name she has given her breast cancer, “Beryl.”
In sometimes hilarious points of the journey Hester and John get into unexpected pickles that involve a crazy array of strangers. A partly funny but also sobering aspect of John’s personality is that he can tell you the environmental “cost” of everything we consume. He does not expect everyone to live as he does, with one backpack and bandanas filled with raw foods like nuts and fruit. For once, although she values him more and more, Hester does not try to seduce John, but instead finds value in him as… a friend? A decent person?
The novel takes us onward to California and Dad, but it is a great, great roadtrip and coming of age at 40 novel. I loved it. Highly recommend. The audio version was well narrated by Cia Court..
They Called me Bookworm 