The Woman Who Walked Into Doors

PLOT SUMMARY:
Roddy Doyle's book, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, is the engaging yet depressing story of a Dublin woman in an abusive marriage. Paula O'Leary, a young middle-class Dublin girl starts life with prospects and hope, and ends up, after four children, seventeen years of abuse, and the news of her husbands death, as an alcoholic cleaning-lady. Paula met Charles "Charlo" Spencer at a dance when she is in her late teens, and falls for him immediately. She doesn't mind his smoking or drinking, or the fact that he is arrogant and controlling. "He's a ride," is Paula's description of him. They get married and have four kids, Nicloa, the oldest, followed by John Paul, Leanne, and Jack. Charlo, however, turns out to be abusive, and beats Paula for everything that goes wrong, whether it's her fault or not. She becomes paranoid, alcoholic, depressed, and very mentally and emotionally unstable. She turns herself around after a seventeen year blur of beatings and unwanted sex by kicking Charlo out of the house. Within the next year, John Paul runs away and becomes a heroin addict, and Nicola finds a good, solid boyfriend and shows promise in life. Roughly a year after kicking Charlo out of the house, Paula receives the news that he has been killed by the Gardai, the police in Ireland. The story is told as a combination of flashbacks to Paula's childhood and life with Charlo, and her dealing with the news of his death and exploring what really happened.

PARAGRAPH #2:
Roddy Doyle is one of Ireland's most famous present day authors, and accordingly, he has his own unique style. The dialogue in his book, The Woman Who Walked into doors, is often written very informally (i.e. no quotation marks and occasionally no new paragraph) and is regularly marked simply with a dash. It is something to get used to when first reading Doyle's book, but it becomes easy to read afterwards. Another thing he does is to open a bracket, and then write often a full page and a bit before closing it. This frequently results in the reader having to go back and find where the bracket starts once they come across the closing bracket, because you've simply forgotten you were reading bracketed text. Having said all this, it is very well written, and fairly easy to comprehend once you've figured out his style. The "dash-dialogue" style works quite well for keeping the story moving. The characters seem like real enough people that could exist somewhere, but you never really get a sense of who they are, because you are just looking at this one event that ties all their lives together. You don't get much background material on any of them except Paula, and a bit on Charlo.

QUOTATIONS PARAGRAPH:
- "I walked into a door."
This is Paula's response to Charlo after he asks her one night where she got a black eye. The trick is that he gave her the black eye by hitting her. This just shows how cruel he is, and how controlled, scared, and confused Paula is that she has to make up a response like that. This is also where the title of the book comes from.

- "The doctor never looked at me. He studied parts of me but he never looked at my eyes. He never looked at me when he spoke. He never saw me. Drink he said to himself. I could see his nose twitching, taking in the smell, deciding. Noe of hte docters looked at me."
This is Paula's impression of the doctors she goes to see for her injuries received from Charlo's beatings. They all appear to think she is a drunk, and they don't really help her out a lot, even though, if they looked and asked the right questions, it would be apparent that her husband beat her, and she needed and "out" on the relationship. This just shows that nobody is really helping Paula in her situation.

-"But my name was called out just when it started to rain and I ended up wanking a good-looking thick in the back of the classroom. That was how you made a name for yourself in 1.6."
This quote shows that Paula has never really had an easy ride through life, that she's always had to work for what she gets, and sometimes the work is unpleasant.