Bokrecension: The woman who walked into doors

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I have been reading a novel called “The woman who walked into doors” written by Roddy Doyle. It is about a woman called Paula Spencer and what she have been going through over the years, about her husband Charlo and all the things he got her into, the boys she have been with as a teenager but also her alcoholic problems during the years. The book also tells a lot about her family life, about her sisters fights with their father but also all the great memories. I have decided to write a character description about Paula because I think that she is very interesting and I think that many other women is in her situation.

In the beginning of the book Paula Spencer is a very secure girl who knows what is right and what is wrong. She is born as Paula O’Leary and she have two sisters named Carmel and Denise, three brothers named Roger, Edward and George and also a very house holding mother and a very special father. Her family did not have that much money and that was why they did not go on long trips, they only did that once that Paula can remember, I want to proof this with a quotation from page 12; “We only ever went on holidays once. I checked, and Mammy says I’m right. We couldn’t afford it, she says. We could have gone some years but it would have meant doing without things, and Mammy and Daddy didn’t think it was worth it.”

Paula had a rather good family life, but her love life was not at all that good. When she started primary school she felt that she had to do certain things with boys to fit in, to be a woman instead of a girl. She wanks boys in the classrooms just because she wants to be a grownup, just to fit in with the rest of the girls. I want to show you the first time she did that with two quotations from page 40; “I wanked a boy in the back of the room. During Religion, in third year. Martin Kavanagh, one of the few fine things in the school and the only one in our class”. In the following quotation you can understand that she did this just to fit in. “I didn’t masturbate him: I wanked him. There’s a difference, I think. During Religion. They all knew we were doing it; that was the point”. It seems to me that Paula became more insecure when she started primary school, she started to care about what people thought and she wanted to be someone else.

When she met Charlo, the guy who will turn out to be her husband later, she started to drink much more. She was really in loved with him, but somehow she knew that he was not good for her, not at all actually. Everybody around her knew that to, but they never sad anything, not until she threw him out, which she did many times. But they always ended up together in the end anyway. They have two kids together after all. One day Paula gets to know that Charlo had been killed when he was escaping the scene of a crime he committed. In this quotation Paula have been told about Charlo’s death but she doesn’t know how he died, on page 24; “My stomach fell under the table. My ankles ached; my heart charged. All of a sudden. Gerard had told me that Charlo was dead but he hadn’t sad how”. This shows that she still loves him and that he still means very much for her, that she does not want to let him go. But she has to let him go now, because he is dead and he will not come back begging her to let him in, to take him back.

During the book Paula goes through a huge change, both the outside and the i...