PORT TOWNSEND — Three women in a small town collide — and try to reconfigure their lives — in “Polite Calamities,” the novel Port Townsend writer Jennifer Gold will launch this week.
At first look, the women have nothing in common. Winifred is a party animal who married into wealth. June is a rich housewife who lives and socializes nearby. Marie is an artist who tries to stay away from people. Yet each is a woman bumping up against the expectations of society, Gold said.
The calamities of the title are their struggles inside and out.
Jennifer Gold is the pen name of Nicole Persun, who will host a launch event and reading Saturday at Imprint Books, 820 Water St. Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. with the free reading and discussion following at 6 p.m.
“Polite Calamities,” the fourth Jennifer Gold novel, unfolds in the summertime in a seaside Rhode Island town during the 1960s, so there’s no internet, no smartphones and no social media.
Our trio of heroines instead have parties — some of them wild — and gossipy get-togethers at a fancy restaurant. Each woman wants and needs real friendship. Each doesn’t know quite how to find it.
Winifred starts out with a dreamy marriage to Bruce, the guy whose background is quite well off. As a newlywed, Winifred seeks to fit into the high society set by hosting parties and joining the women’s philanthropic club. None of this works.
Then her gorgeous husband dies suddenly. The other women’s gloves come off. Winifred is tossed out.
She connects with Marie, though. The two shop at the same grocery store. Marie, trying to save up for a purchase she believes will set her free from her regrets, starts living in her car. When Winifred realizes this — Winifred, who lives alone in her huge beachside house — she invites Marie to come and live there.
As for June, she’s always been part of the elite in this town. That doesn’t mean most of the other women are kind to her, though. There’s but one rich wife, Rosie, who shows June real compassion. June’s life may look easy, but she suffers from a medical condition that ruins all too many days. She suffers all too much before finding a female physician who doesn’t dismiss her complaints. Remember, this is the 1960s.
Circumstances and proximity bring June, Winifred and Marie together as they go on their journeys into new lives. Things are messy, the “Polite Calamities’” author said, and each woman’s nature is made of light and dark.
“There’s a lot of my own story in Marie,” she said. “I feel like I’m very unlike Winifred or June.
“June was a very challenging character to write. From a values standpoint, she is very different from me. But writing about her negative self-talk, her pain and her body image was very cathartic.
“Winifred is the popular girl I wish I could be,” she added.
Winifred appears to be great at making friends. Her parties after she becomes a widow are giant bashes with multiple bands and hundreds of guests carrying on.
Yet underneath it all, there’s an insecurity in Winifred.
“I really see pieces of myself in all of them,” Gold said. “I think that’s what makes characters come alive.”
Then there’s Rosie. It was fun, the author said, to create someone whom others see as naive but who is genuinely kind. Rosie is so much smarter than they all think she is.
“The book is so much about women being underestimated,” Gold said.
Friendships fascinate this Gold. Her novel, in progress now, is a “contemporary best friends story,” she said, and it’s lighter in tone than “Calamities.”
Gold likes to call her genre “book club fiction,” as in novels that are highly discussable. The next book, which she is currently pitching for a publishing deal, “is going to be more fun,” she added, “but there is plenty of the same interpersonal drama.”
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Diane Urbani de la Paz is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Port Townsend.
