About the Monicas

Tessa Hadley

• The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler
  Chatto, 306 pp, £16.99, January 2004, ISBN 0 7011 7734 9

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’.