The Mermaid Chair
Sue Monk Kidd

Reviewed by Lee Lemon Peoples

Jessie was nine years old when her father’s boat exploded, reportedly because of a leaking fuel line, ignited by a spark from the pipe she had given her father as a gift for Father’s Day. At forty-two years old, happily married with her only child, a daughter, now in college, Jessie experiences a feeling of restlessness, which she does not understand nor does she confront until she is called back home to take care of her mother. For some unknown reason, Nelle Dubois, her mother, has chopped off the index finger (the “pointing” finger) on her right hand. Returning to Egret Island, a tiny barrier island off the coast of South Carolina, where she grew up, she meets and falls in love with Brother Thomas, a Benedictine monk with conflicts of his own.

Sue Monk Kidd, the best-selling author of The Secret Life of Bees, has this novel, The Mermaid Chair, set in the winter and spring of 1988. A year later her main character, Jessie Sullivan, looks back on the incident in an attempt to bear it by telling about it: “They say you can bear anything if you can tell a story about it.”

I’ve always admired people who were willing to take chances and suffer the consequences, but never did I dream I’d admire a woman (or a man for that matter) for infidelity, nor did I ever dream I’d admire the husband his forgiveness of that wife’s infidelity. While this novel has elements of mythology and legend (the mermaid chair, Saint Senara, a former mermaid), it is about Christianity, more specifically, Catholicism.

When Jessie was a child, her father told her the story of mermaids living in the waters around the island. Their main job was to save humans, he said, and years later, she wonders if they didn’t save her. Never ever having done anything out of the ordinary, she, at forty-two years old “dove” into impropriety: