About the Monicas 
Tessa Hadley
- The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler
At the beginning of her short story ‘Jakarta’, Alice Munro describes two young women who choose a spot on a beach because it’s sheltered and because ‘they want to be out of sight of a group of women who use the beach every day. They call these women the Monicas.’ The Monicas have two or three or four children apiece; they build a temporary domestic encampment on the beach (‘diaper bags, picnic hampers, inflatable rafts and whales, toys, lotions’); and their conversation revolves around the cheapest place to buy meat, the uses of zinc ointment, soda’s superiority to baking powder. Sonje and Kath don’t want to belong to the Monicas. In their hiding place, Kath smokes defiantly while she breastfeeds, and they read (in a nicely understated twist of self-reference) short stories by Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence. Sonje has lost her job at the library because she’s suspected of ‘Communism’.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Tessa Hadley teaches at Bath Spa University. A collection of stories, Sunstroke, and a novel, The Master Bedroom, were published last year.
Other articles by this contributor:
An Attic Full of Sermons · Marilynne Robinson
Dream Leaps · Alice Munro
print layout
tell a friend