Hood

by Emma Donoghue

Overview

From the New York Times bestselling author of Room, Hood is a tale of grief and lust, frustration and hilarity, death and family.

“Hood is thoroughly contemporary in how richly it depicts a beloved's death to review a couple's bumpy love history...This book's real pleasures lie in its intimate insights, its accurate characters and its sharp, rich observations... the greatest achievement of Hood is how it captures the domesticity of erotic passion” – Boston Globe

Penelope O’Grady and Cara Wall are risking disaster when, like teenagers in any intolerant time and place—here, a Dublin convent school in the late 1970s—they fall in love. Yet Cara, the free spirit, and Pen, the stoic, craft a bond so strong it seems as though nothing could sever it: not the bickering, not the secrets, not even Cara’s infidelities.

But thirteen years on, a car crash kills Cara and rips the lid off Pen’s world. Pen is still in the closet, teaching at her old school, living under the roof of Cara’s gentle father, who thinks of her as his daughter’s friend. How can she survive widowhood without even daring to claim the word? Over the course of one surreal week of bereavement, she is battered by memories that range from the humiliating, to the exalted, to the erotic, to the funny. It will take Pen all her intelligence and wit to sort through her tumultuous past with Cara, and all the nerve she can muster to start remaking her life.

Donoghue’s Hood is a masterfully crafted narrative of relationships and a daring, deft exploration of the love’s imperfection—and how it can nonetheless dominate our lives as we grow and change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062117106
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/11/2011
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.76(d)

About the Author

Emma Donoghue is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Room sold more than two million copies and won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and the Caribbean). It was also shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes. Donoghue scripted the Canadian-Irish film adaptation, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The Wonder was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Donoghue cowrote the 2022 screen adaptation for Netflix. The Pull of the Stars was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Donoghue’s fiction ranges from the contemporary (Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing, Touchy Subjects, Akin) to the historical (Haven, Slammerkin, The Sealed Letter, Astray, Frog Music) and includes two books for young readers, The Lotterys Plus One and The Lotterys More or Less.

Hometown:

London, England and Ontario, Canada

Date of Birth:

October 24, 1969

Place of Birth:

Dublin, Ireland

Education:

B.A. in English and French, University College Dublin, 1990; Ph.D. in English, University of Cambridge, 1998

Website:

http://www.emmadonoghue.com

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt

SUNDAY

Mayday in 1980? heat sealing my fingers together. Why is it the most ordinary images that fall out, when I shuffle the memories? Two girls in a secondhand bookshop, hands sticky with sampled perfumes from an afternoon's Dublin.

Up these four storeys of shelves, time moves more slowly than outside on the quays of the dirty river. One window cuts a slab of sunlight; dust motes twitch through it. I shut my eyes and breathe in. 'Which did I put on my thumb, Cara, do you remember?'

No answer. I stretch my hand towards her over the Irish poetry shelf, as if hitching a lift. 'All I can smell is old books; you have a go. Was it sandalwood?'

Cam emerges from a cartoon, and dips to my hand She wrinkles her nose, which has always reminded me of an 'is less than' sign in algebra.

'Not nice?' I ask.

'Dunno, Pen. Something liquorishy.' Her eyes drift back to the page.

'I hate liquorice.' All I can make out now is vile strawberry on the wrist. I offer my thumb for Cara to smell again, but she has edged down a shelf to Theology. My arm moves in her wake and topples a pyramid of Surprising Summer Salads.

I'm sure to have torn one. I have only ninety-two pence in my drawstring purse, and my belly is cramping. It occurs to me to simply shift my weight on to the ball of my foot and take off like a crazed rhinoceros through the door, Then, being a responsible citizen, even at seventeen, I put my mother's spare handbag down beside the sprawl of books, and kneel. The princess who sorted seeds from sand at least had eloquent ants to help her. All I get are Cara's eyes rolling from the safe distance of the Marxismshelf, and a snigger from some art student over by the window. Luckily the black-lipsticked Goth at the till is engrossed in finding a paper bag for an old atlas; in any other bookshop a saleswoman would be pursing her lips and planting her stiletto heels six inches from my fingers. The tomb of Surprising Summer Salads I build is better ventilated than the original, almost Japanese. I have been neat, no one can make me buy a copy. If it were Astonishing Autumn Appetizers, now, I might consider it

I'm blithering, amn't I?

Cara is over by Aviation pretending not to know me, so I set off downstairs; trying to soften the slap of my feet on the wood. Ragged posters for gigs and therapies paper the winding stairwell; their sellotape fingers flap in my breeze. Between the third and second floors the blood wells and I think I may be going to topple. Familiar clogs hit the steps behind me.

'Cup of coffee?'

 

Cara doesn't seem to hear, as her shoulders poke past, but when we have come out of the bookshop on to the dazzling quay she says, 'I'm off caffeine. Pen, I thought I told you.'

'Since when?' I shout into a surge of traffic.

'This morning.'

I let out my sigh as a yawn. A glass of water and a doughnut?'

'As you wish.'

I pause for a second halfway along the Ha'penny Bridge, to feel it bounce under the weight of feet. I refuse the first and second cafés we pass, as rip-offs. Cara wipes a dark red strand off her eyebrow. 'Pen, you know I've got plenty.'

I'd choke on a bun that cost thirty-five pee.' It sounds like a point of principle, but is based on the ninety-two pence remaining in my purse.

We thread our way through the crowd on College Green in what I hope is a companionable silence. Town is full of twelve-year-olds in limp minis and pedal-pushers; their shoulders are peanut -red, scored with strapmarks. I have often wondered if the Irish consider it ungrateful to use sun block-As we head up Grafton Street the light is like a splash of lemon juice in my face I turn my stiff neck to find Cara, but she is ahead of me. Five yards ahead, in fact, sprinting. How odd. I scan the mass of shoppers for a familiar face, but then I realize that she is not running up to anyone, just running. Her head is down. Her fringed purse is smacking from rib to rib. I stand still and lose her.

When I catch sight of her narrow body hurtling past the flower barrows a great weariness comes over me. It occurs to me, by no means for the first time, to let Cara go. But while that thought is worming its way down the nerves, through the labyrinths of flesh, to reach my feet, they are already flailing a path up the street. When I get past the cluster of tourists around the mandolin player, I grip my handbag under my elbow and gather speed- Cara is nowhere in sight, but I trust that even lanky footballers run out of energy when they've eaten nothing all day and their clogs are heavy.

Exercise is good for cramps, I tell myself, ho ho. It is not so much the pain that worries me as the possibility that I may take a leap too far and leave my reproductive system, steaming gently, on the pavement outside Bewleys Cafe. What was the name of that woman in labour, who, forced to race against a horse for the men of Ulster, gave birth at the winning post and cursed them to suffer the same pains every year?

At the top of Grafton Street I begin to doubt my lung capacity. Motivation falters too; Cara could be halfway to Belfast now for all I care. Then I catch sight of a moving dot halfway along Stephen's Green. I heave a sticky breath and launch myself forward again, swerving round a lamp-post.

My little gold boat is swinging on its chain, its points pricking my throat. Slow down, Cara. 'Caaaahra! Cha-cha-cha!' as the girls at school bawl when we play rounders out the back field. You've made your point, my beloved. I am following, the puppet is still attached to the string.

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Excerpted from Hood by Emma Donoghue. Copyright © 1998 by Emma Donoghue. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Editorial Reviews

Utterly charming. . . . Here again, Ms. Donoghue displays her confidence by avoiding the grandiose and the showy, and dipping into the ordinary with control and the occasional sustaining descriptive flashes of a born writer.” — New York Times Book Review

“A delicate and moving love story.” — Irish Times

“Emma Donoghue negotiates this territory deftly and with rather startling humor. . . . It is Pen’s winning sanity and avid eye for absurdity—in the Church and in the bedroom—that keep this confident, touching novel afloat.” — The Independent on Sunday

“[A] love story that well conveys the complexities and nuances of intimate relationships . . . stately and elegiac.” — Booklist

From the Publisher

Utterly charming. . . . Here again, Ms. Donoghue displays her confidence by avoiding the grandiose and the showy, and dipping into the ordinary with control and the occasional sustaining descriptive flashes of a born writer.

New York Times Book Review

[A] love story that well conveys the complexities and nuances of intimate relationships . . . stately and elegiac.

Booklist

Emma Donoghue negotiates this territory deftly and with rather startling humor. . . . It is Pen’s winning sanity and avid eye for absurdity—in the Church and in the bedroom—that keep this confident, touching novel afloat.

The Independent on Sunday

A delicate and moving love story.

Irish Times

[A] love story that well conveys the complexities and nuances of intimate relationships . . . stately and elegiac.

Booklist

"I'm blithering, amn't I?" asks Pen O'Grady, narrator of Donoghue's second novel (after Stir-Fry). Many readers will answer "yes"-and that's a shame, because behind Pen's banal chattiness lies an agreeable and affecting story. Thirty-year-old Dublin schoolteacher Pen has just lost her lover of 13 years, Cara Wall, in a car crash. Though mapping the trajectory of Pen's grief seems Donoghue's primary aim, she also explores issues untouched by death: Will Pen bed Cara's sexy older sister, Kate, who's flown home from America for the funeral? Will Pen find the courage to come out to her mother and to Cara's father? Quotidian tails of housecleaning and coffee-brewing share space, sometimes too much, with tender and troubling flashbacks of life with the flame-haired, faithless Cara, whom Pen first seduced on their convent-school roof. Donoghue's unsentimental examination of the complex relationship between the two women is a pleasure, but the story line, lacking dramatic tension, ultimately sags under the weight of Pen's wordiness. U.K., translation, dramatic rights: Caroline Davidson, London. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This second novel by Donoghue (Stir-fry, 1994) offers an elegiac reconstruction of a long love affair and a fascinating portrait of lesbian society in modern Ireland.

Bright, self-assured, dependable Pen O'Grady first meets neurotic, alluring, exasperating Cara while both are in convent school. The two quickly become fast friends and, more gradually, lovers. Donoghue offers a wry, sharply observed portrait of the manner in which the adolescent Pen and Cara come to terms with their sexuality, the mingled fear and exuberance of their discovery, the conflicting pressures to hide and proclaim their love. Their physical passion ("a blur of bliss across the brain") turns out to be the simplest part of the relationship. Cara, restless, romantic, scornful of the more mundane elements of life (Living, Pen says, "seemed to be more of a battle for Cara than anyone I knew") seems driven to wander: She repeatedly breaks off the affair, pursues (sometimes disastrously) other women, yet always eventually returns to the tart but forgiving Pen. She is returning yet again, after a brief fling, when she dies in an accident. The novel is essentially a monologue as, from the perspective of the week in which her lover is buried, Pen, alternately angry or despairing, looks back over their 14-year relationship, reconstructing it, attempting to make some sense of their lives together. Pen ruefully admits that she has always been "solid," dependable, even predictable. But Donoghue does a deft job of catching Pen's wry intelligence and intense romanticism, the deep certainty she has in her identity. She is less successful with Cara, who remains a somewhat enigmatic figure: It's uncertain whether Cara is merely intensely self-absorbed or a generous, tormented figure.

Fortunately, though, it's Pen who dominates this spare, powerful narrative. Her unsparing record of a difficult, intense, vital affair, and her meditations on the nature of desire, are exact and profoundly moving.

Kirkus Reviews