Paula Spencer is the follow-up novel to Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. It’s been ten years since Paula’s husband, Charlo, was shot by police after he botched a robbery and murdered someone. Eldest daughter, Nicola, is successful and patronizing. John Paul, absent in the first novel except in flashbacks because he ran away from home at sixteen, is trying to make a go with the newly-sober Paula. Leanne at twenty-two hasn’t left home and shows signs of alcoholism herself. The baby, Jack, is sixteen and trying to get through school with his head down. We open with Paula on her birthday, which almost no one has remembered, newly sober. Doyle ends the book one year later on Paula’s birthday, giving readers a clear timeline.

Where as The Woman Who Walked Into Doors felt like going up the first big hill on a rollercoaster, knowing that it has to come charging down, Paula Spencer feels more circular. The problems are there, and it’s easy for one day to blur into the next because Paula’s life is about repetition. Work, home, worry, don’t drink. And although the first book was about Paula’s experiences, this next edition puts Paula front and center. We feel even more in her head that we did last time, which means the title was rightfully chosen. In other words, The Woman felt like it had set pieces and scenes, but Paula Spencer feels like a dream that makes sense, that is not abstract. For example, little moments stand out: “She takes the waffles from the freezer. There are eight left in the box, and three more days to payday. She’s two waffles ahead. She’ll leave them to Jack in her will.” I love that aspect because when we are trying to avoid something (in her case, alcohol) and fix things that feel unfixable (in her case, her relationship with her children), life doesn’t feel neatly laid out.

Watching Paula try to connect to her children is both painful and emotional. She obviously has a favorite (Jack) and a least favorite (Leanne), though the wonderful Nicola won’t stop mothering Paula. We understand it; Nicola has been the mother since she was a kid, but Paula feels belittled. The relationship with John Paul is new since he decided that he wants his children to know their granny. When she has hard feelings against him, she corrects herself: “[John Paul] smiles. He decides to smile. She’s being unfair; she’s being a bitch. She’s watching a miracle. She should be down on her fuckin’ knees.” Doyle repeats this theme — how grateful Paula should be because she was a horrible mother — which is something our little three-person book club disagreed about. I felt she should explain to her four children how coping through domestic violence can make a monster of the abused person, too. I was outnumbered; the other two readers were glad Paula took responsibility for everything, never bringing up Charlo once.

While the relationships with all four children are drastically different, Paula struggles with her least favorite, the child who reminds her most of herself and Charlo: Leanne. Doyle is a genius at writing characters and especially dialogue. As Paula carefully tries to ask Leanne if she has a problem with drinking by asking if she has troubles getting up in the morning, Leanne lashes out, going for total emotional annihilation: “Remember when I woke up once and you were beside me and you were asleep? And your face was stuck to my pillow with your vomit. . . . Because I don’t feel nearly as bad as that when I wake up. . .” Everything Paula says is an opportunity for Leanne to remind her mother that while readers like me think Paula deserves sympathy, the lived experience of Leanne and her siblings was abuse and neglect at the hands of their mother.

Doyle still includes funny moments, though not as often because it wouldn’t land well in Paula Spencer. She tells a man on their first date that her husband was shot by police, so the news crews showed up at her house even though the husband hasn’t lived there in a year. The date replies, “I hope you had the grass cut, Paula.” Other moments aren’t funny so much as odd, like Paula asking Jack who The White Stripes is because she’s been hired to clean the concert venue. For the rest of the story, she’s a The White Stripes fan, buying a radio and their CD. Little moments like these are that good ol’ Roddy Doyle shining through, keeping things from being bleak the entire reading experience.

What Doyle does best is making you feel like these are real people, which is great because there is one final book about Paula Spencer, and I’m looking forward to her moving in a positive direction with her job, relationships with her children, and dating.