Solo Mom Life's a Beach (Read)

Three short yet splendid books for a day at the shore

Much as I adore reading on the beach, I hate the term ‘beach read.’ It’s a marketing ploy designed to sell the summer’s hottest titles to a woman like me, who dreams of blissfully uninterrupted hours with her toes in the sand and a book in her hand. Part of me wants to dissect the term at length and expose it as essentially meaningless, but if I’m being honest, my problem with it is also personal: this beach reading life they’re schilling is so far from my day-to-day reality that it just antagonizes the green-eyed monster within.

As a solo mom with very limited childcare, any beach time I get is generally spent with my kids, and while I genuinely enjoy it—I am ‘that mom’ who enthusiastically helps to build sandcastles and dig canals—I can’t take my eyes off my kids when they’re in the water long enough to get into any sort of book. A ‘beach read’ in this context is a magazine expressly bought and saved for the moments they’re both happily occupied on dry land.

In the blessed event that I do get to go to the beach by myself, I’ll just bring whatever I’m currently reading—unless it is a doorstopper. A big fat book at the beach basically broadcasts ‘nerd alert’ at top volume, and proud as I am to send that message far and wide, a heavy beach bag is a real drag. I pack my beach bag the way I do my largest purse before boarding an airplane. Even the smallest item must earn its place inside by performing some crucial function, and the reason for this is twofold: one, I refuse to lug more than I can comfortably carry and two, I am unwilling to leave home without at least one paperback book and a snack.

For me, the ideal ‘beach read’ is a book I can consume over the course of one day on the shore, with brief pauses for dips in the water, sunscreen reapplication, and unabashed people-watching courtesy of my dark, oversized sunglasses. So we’re talking short—ideally under 300 pages—but so good that I’m tempted to start over at page one, should there be any daylight to spare when I get to the end.

Here are my top three beach reads, from shortest to longest.

The Godmother: A Crime Novel, by Hannelore Cayre (translated by Stephanie Smee)

At just 184 pages, The Godmother is practically weightless. You’ll barely feel its presence in your beach bag—but you will feel for the narrator of this story, even if she would rather you didn’t. Sure, Patience lost almost everything twenty-six years ago, when her husband suddenly died, leaving her with two young daughters and no resources—but, as she explains, her grief also transformed her into “a new woman, mature, sad and ready for combat. An anomaly, an odd sock. I was the widow Portefeux!”

When we first meet her on the page, Patience is fifty-three and working as a Franco-Arab court interpreter. Her daughters are away at university, her mother is in a care home, and the wildly expensive bills are all addressed to Patience, whose under-the-table salary is not nearly enough. It’s a problem only the Godmother can solve, and how she does it will have you on the edge of your beach chair.

The Hours, by Michael Cunningham

This book hardly needs my endorsement. I mean, it won the Pulitzer. But I’m going to talk about it anyway, because I love it and my memory of reading it. It was a few summers ago now, flopped belly down on a floating dock in Lac Primeau. Every so often I would slip off the edge to cool off, only to clamber back up and open the book again. It was the first week of July, so my skin was still Canadian winter-white and my bathing suit, a deep and shiny black; to the boaters occasionally passing by in the distance, I must have resembled a literate walrus. Maybe a seal, to the more kind-minded among them.

You don’t need to be familiar with the life and work of Virginia Woolf to enjoy The Hours, though it is an even richer experience for those of you who are. Cunningham’s novel has not one, but three plot lines, each with its own heroine: Woolf herself, in the process of writing Mrs Dalloway; Clarissa Vaughan, who is planning a splashy party for a dear friend nearing the end of his life; and Laura Brown, who is reading Woolf’s novel in her suburban home in the 1950s, and coping with domestic bliss as it was defined at that time.

It’s just 226 pages, and as absorbing as it is absorbent; my copy is crinkly with sun-dried lakewater about two thirds of the way in, possibly because I was in such a hurry to get back to it I failed to towel dry my hair first.

French Exit, by Patrick DeWitt

At the risk of channeling one of my all-time favourite SNL characters: this book has everything. A glamourous, sharp-witted widow and an eccentric man-child. The remnants of immense wealth. Delightfully absurd social situations. A cruise ship. A psychic. A hapless PI. A Parisian apartment big enough to ride a bicycle in. Pathos. A cat inhabited by the spirit of a ferocious litigator.

I could go on, but really, if any of the above has piqued your interest, you should just read it. It’s only 284 pages. I’ve read it twice, maybe three times, and none of those times were at the beach. The only reason I’m glad about that is that I often laugh out loud when I read. My family is used to it, but I imagine neighbouring sunbathers would be startled and annoyed by my random yelps of amusement.

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What was the last book you took to the beach? Was it a so-called ‘beach read’? Did you choose based on the book’s physical properties, or its content? Please, it may be weeks before my toes feel sand. Let me live vicariously through your stories.