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There are nine of us, we have met on the second Thursday of every month for eleven years, and by last spring six of us were taking the same thing without anyone ever deciding to. That is the part that still gets me. Nobody organized it. Nobody stood up at book club and made an announcement. It just spread, the way things spread through a group of women who have known each other for a decade — quietly, one conversation at a time, in the kitchen while someone refilled the crackers. I want to tell you the whole story. My name is Margaret. People call me Meg. I am 58 years old. I live in a town called Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in a colonial on a street where the maple trees turn the color of a brick fireplace every October. I am a retired elementary school librarian. My husband Dale is a retired insurance adjuster. We have two grown daughters and four grandchildren. The book club started in 2014. Nine women, all roughly the same age, all living within a few miles of each other. We read a book a month. Half the time we talk about the book for twenty minutes and then we talk about our lives for two hours. That is the real reason any of us go. Here is the problem I had been quietly living with, and the problem it turned out half the room had been quietly living with too. For about three years, my body had stopped feeling like my body. My face was puffy every morning and took half the day to settle. My rings had not fit in over a year. My ankles by dinnertime did not look like my ankles. I felt heavy in a way that had nothing to do with the number on the scale, which had barely moved. I had been to my doctor. The labs were normal. I was told it was hormones and age and to drink more water. I had not told anyone at book club. You do not bring that to book club. You bring the book. But last spring I noticed something in the kitchen during a refill. Karen — who had been looking heavy and tired for as long as I had been looking heavy and tired — looked dif
