Present Tense
Description
Abby has been married to Ira for twenty-five years. The marriage has always seemed solid, they’re in good health, live in a peaceful part of Scotland and are more or less solvent.
But Johnathan, her much-loved son, is working in New York - Ira’s home town - and, in love with the talented Rachel, may never come home while her feckless teenage daughter Linnie is pregnant by a monosyllabic youth.
August at their house in France should give Abby a month to relax and take stock. But in the beauty and heat of the Provençal summer, anxieties for her children mix with the insecurities of growing older as she doubts the worth of her life and questions the possibility of happiness in the future - a future foreshadowed by thinning hair, diminished libido and swarming regrets.
There is always Ira, of course - there always has been - and maybe the sun will lighten the scratchy, sparring texture of their life together.
Through joint and separate reflections and reminiscence, and in the course of a short odyssey through the household of the fabulous MacDonald family with its strange IVF twins and wistful Filipina maid, through a panic attack on the Autoroute du Soleil and in fraught long-distance conversation with the children, Abby begins an emotional transition from her middle years to older age and from freyed nerves to a state of acceptance. Acceptance of the things she cannot change - Ira, the kids, the wider world and herself.
But Johnathan, her much-loved son, is working in New York - Ira’s home town - and, in love with the talented Rachel, may never come home while her feckless teenage daughter Linnie is pregnant by a monosyllabic youth.
August at their house in France should give Abby a month to relax and take stock. But in the beauty and heat of the Provençal summer, anxieties for her children mix with the insecurities of growing older as she doubts the worth of her life and questions the possibility of happiness in the future - a future foreshadowed by thinning hair, diminished libido and swarming regrets.
There is always Ira, of course - there always has been - and maybe the sun will lighten the scratchy, sparring texture of their life together.
Through joint and separate reflections and reminiscence, and in the course of a short odyssey through the household of the fabulous MacDonald family with its strange IVF twins and wistful Filipina maid, through a panic attack on the Autoroute du Soleil and in fraught long-distance conversation with the children, Abby begins an emotional transition from her middle years to older age and from freyed nerves to a state of acceptance. Acceptance of the things she cannot change - Ira, the kids, the wider world and herself.
