A Week in October
by Elizabeth Subercaseaux
List Price: $22.95
Pages: 224
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781590512883
Publisher: Other Press
Elizabeth Subercaseaux was born in Chile, the great-great-granddaughter of the German composer Robert Schumann. She is the best-selling author of ten books. Her nonfiction includes Michelle, a biography of the first woman to be elected president in Chile, and the amusing feminist manifesto, The Ten Things a Chilean Woman Should Never Do. Subercaseaux lives in Pennsylvania.
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Author’s Note
She was one of my best friends. She had eight children and was forty-six years old. One night we were sitting around the fire at my house in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, and she told me that she felt tired, very tired, not of life but of not having her own life, tired of living through others, through her husband and family. At one point in our conversation I said to her, half in jest and half seriously: Why don’t you get a lover, for example, or a hobby, or anything that you could call your own, a space that not even your husband or your children could enter? She looked at me, surprised by my suggestion, but she didn’t say anything in reply.
Two month after that conversation she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and ten months later she was dead.
The night following her burial, she appeared to me in a dream. She was barefoot, dressed in a beautiful red tunic. She looked radiant, light as a feather, carefree. She kept looking at me for a while, relaxed and content with a smile on her face. Finally, she said: “Your were absolutely right. I should have had a lover,” and then she disappeared.
The next day I started writing “A Week in October,” inspired by that unique space in a woman’s life that my friend never had. It’s not necessarily about having a lover, but having something you can call your own, something secret, something exclusively yours. It is a space in the midst of which you can look at yourself in the mirror and say: “That’s me, and that’s my life that I’m living.”
—Elizabeth Subercaseaux
Excerpted from A Week in October © Copyright 2009 by Elizabeth Subercaseaux. Reprinted with permission by Other Press. All rights reserved.
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