The Hours by Michael Cunningham

The Hours by Michael Cunningham is a book about people deciding whether or not to commit suicide or not.

The book toggles between the stories of three characters:

• Virginia Woolf: fictional depiction of the real life author's creative process of determining the fate of one of her famous characters, Mrs. Dalloway (i.e. whether or not she will kill herself). Virginia Woolf did commit suicide in real life and that is also represented in the book.
• Laura Brown: 50's housewife in Los Angeles. She feels overwhelmed and deeply unsatisfied with her seemingly perfect house, husband, and son. She also goes through a thought process of deciding if she will continue on with life or not.
• Clarissa Vaughn: modern-day Lesbian who is spending the day organizing a party for her dearest friend, Richard, who has won a very prestigious literary award for his poetry and who is also dying of AIDS.

These three stories are seemingly unconnected in the beginning of the book. As the storyline progresses, the parallels between many of the characters are revealed and the reader learns how some of the lives are connected. The thoughts and feelings of Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway, Richard, and Laura are all echoed by each other. However, different decisions are made by each of the characters for different reasons.

Also note that each of these three characters' stories are told over the course of one day (which I think is important to the author's theme).

I liked how the stories intertwined together at the end of the book. I saw the movie version of this book several years ago and missed a lot of what was going on. Reading the book gave this story a lot more depth and I was able to understand what the author was trying to communicate a lot better.

The story itself was a little bit of a bummer. People who count "the hours" of their lives like a bored employees counts the minutes until quitting time is not uplifting to me!

Ultimately, some characters cannot tolerate the wait until death, and others decide that life is too sweet to give up. Who lives and who dies lies with the pages of the book - you'll have to read it to find out.

I kind of want to learn more about Virginia Woolf after reading this book. From my very brief look on the internet, she suffered from some sexual abuse as a child which led to a lot of her mental troubles as a grown up.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

-Laurie