In the final book about Paula Spencer, The Woman Behind the Door by Roddy Doyle takes us another seventeen years into the future. Now, Paula’s own children are middle age. Her “baby” has moved out and become a professor in Chicago. Her middle children, both of whom had addition issues in the previous books, are leading sober lives. However, Paula’s oldest child, Nicola, the one who basically raised herself and her siblings, and has mothered Paula for the last sixty years, too, has claimed she hates her spouse and children and abandoned them, showing up at Paula’s door in the middle of the COVID pandemic.

From the very first pages, we know Paula is doing better. She has a job she likes, she lives alone and loves it, and her new best friend, Mary, keeps Paula laughing and smiling. I love that Doyle allows Paula joy after two books of struggling (in The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Paula living in a domestic violence situation and became an alcoholic; in Paula Spencer she held tight to her sobriety and repaired relationships with her children). I mentioned this before, but while I support people “staying in their own lane” when writing in an effort to hear stories from people with lived experience, I’m also not against books in which characters are well written with empathy and respect. Doyle does that with both Paula and Nicola, the main characters of this last installation.

I read the Paula Spencer trilogy with a book club, and we all agreed that it was strange Doyle chose Nicola to be the child who abandons her family. Why not continue with Leanne, whom we left a bitter, cruel alcoholic? It felt like quite a pivot. Also, just as a caution The Woman Behind the Door is set during the COVID-19 pandemic, so if you don’t want to be reminded of that time, this book is not for you. Two of my book club members were upset about the setting, though I wasn’t. It simply felt close in the review mirror, if you will. Also, the pandemic makes Doyle’s novel limited in settings, and the title phrase “behind the door” applies to Paula when she get sick and as she tries to coax her eldest child to talk to her from behind a closed bedroom door.

However, Doyle also explores the dangers of comparing suffering, what some call the “suffer olympics,” when Paula tries to say that her being beaten nearly to death for seventeen years is not the same as Nicola feeling done with her family. For instance, “—I don’t know what I feel, said Nicola. —I don’t know if I feel. I don’t know. And I don’t know why it’s all about Tony. What’s wrong with Tony, what’s right about Tony. There’s nothing wrong or right. I don’t want to be a wife. I think I know that much.”

Overall, this wasn’t quite the conclusion I wanted from Doyle, though I think it’s worth completing the trilogy to finally get Paula to a place of joy. The book is still hilarious in places, interesting, realistic, open, and heartfelt.