My Chicken Soup for the Soul
Do the names Rosamunde Pilcher and Maeve Binchy mean anything to you? Have you heard of the novel The Shell Seekers or seen the 1995 film Circle of Friends starring Minnie Driver? It’s okay if you haven’t—just know there’s a world of literature out there for you to explore.
I stumbled into Binchy’s Circle of Friends as a joke, after picking it haphazardly off the shelf and daring it to evoke an emotion in me. It’s the kind of book you find wedged between David Baldacci and Nicholas Sparks on your grandmother’s bookshelf. One of those discreet mass market paperbacks that endlessly spawn at used bookstores and thrift shops. No bigger than my hand and 600 pages of tiny font. Maybe I’ll get through half, I told myself. Something just to pass the time. Next thing I know I’m completely enmeshed in the fictional Irish town of Knockglen, it’s 1958, and I’m rooting for my dear friend Benny to kiss her crush Jack.
These books are dangerously easy to fall into and impossibly hard to leave. You never want to rush through them. You want to unpack your things and stay a while. And as you approach the end, you find 600 pages isn’t nearly enough. It’s magic. From Circle of Friends, I went to Rosamunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers, then her Wild Mountain Thyme and Winter Solstice, then Binchy’s Tara Road, and I’m currently reading Pilcher’s September. I need to pick one up every few months or I get a little depressed.
For me, it’s the setting that creates the magic. Both authors focused their stories on quaint, small towns in the British or Irish countryside—Pilcher was partial to Cornwall and the Scottish Highlands; Binchy preferred the more peaceful suburbs of Dublin. Inclement weather usually plays a part in furthering the plot, or, at the very least, contributes to the seasonal atmosphere that’s practically a character itself. Oh no, a blizzard has blown through town, shutting down all the roads, and now this handsome stranger is at my door and needs a place to stay! A very real plot point in Winter Solstice.
The most magical thing of all is that these novels don’t feel corny. I’ve never rolled my eyes when reading one, or sighed with exasperation. It’s because Pilcher and Binchy took themselves, and their work, seriously. They understood that storytelling doesn’t need to be reinventing the wheel, it just needs to be genuine.
Romance novels today—and “chick lit” at large—reek of overused tropes and uninspired thinking (not that there aren’t some notable exceptions). Every writer seems to be modeling themselves after Emily Henry or Elin Hilderbrand. The bold ones attempt to be poor imitations of Sally Rooney. Most romance novels coming out these days don’t even want to be novels; they want to be screenplays. They allege to offer readers the world of Gilmore Girls with a Hugh-Grant-in-Notting-Hill love interest, but I find so, so many of them lacking heart. Or, for that matter, earnestness.
I wouldn’t even categorize Pilcher and Binchy as romance novelists because their books encapsulate everything. From girlhood to friendship to parenthood to grief. Yes, there is typically a love story at the center—though it is just as often about the love between best friends as it is about lovers. When there is romance, the male love interests are less Hugh Grant and more divorced-middle-aged-advertising-exec-with-a-heart-of-gold. Someone we are much more likely to run into…A more achievable love.
Above all else, these are stories about community. About how to contribute meaningfully to the place you live in, and how to sustain relationships with people despite complicated histories.
I think I’m so drawn to Pilcher and Binchy because their writing has none of the modern affectation that drives me crazy. It helps that the bulk of their work was written in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when clichés (for my generation) weren’t clichés yet. Still, my point stands. These novels can be simple and predictable, but they are bursting with heart and delicate with the truth. It’s like hearing your grandmother tell the same story for the millionth time but you never stop leaning in and listening because she is the one telling it.
With that being said, these books are not copy-and-paste iterations of the same tired sentiment. Rosamunde Pilcher and Maeve Binchy are not interchangeable, nor are the stories within their respective bibliographies. I find Pilcher’s work better written, but I like Binchy’s expansive network of characters and how she intersects and diverges their lives. In the vein of The Byrds and/or Ecclesiastes: there is a time for Pilcher, and a time for Binchy; a time for The Shell Seekers, and a time for Winter Solstice.
Not only is there a selection for every season, but there is also one for every age. Open Circle of Friends to grow up with a girl named Benny, as she moves away to college and falls in love for the first time. Open Tara Road to meet a 39-year-old housewife named Ria who’s trying to figure out where her life went wrong. Open September to spend the month with Violet, an aging matriarch with her fingers in one too many pies.
The stakes are low and the vibes are high. A respite during these trying times.