I was in two minds which sister to use from In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner for this week's heroine. Rose, the hardworking lawyer who has many issues or Maggie, unemployed, a petty thief and stealer of her sister's boyfriend.
But the sister I identify with most is Rose. At the beginning of the book she works extremely hard and is having an affair with a senior partner at the firm (I'm not saying I am her, just I can identify with her). Her sister drives her nuts, she has a wardrobe of shoes she hardly wears which are "borrowed" by her sister, then Maggie betrays her. Deliberately.
As we delve into the sister's pasts, we see what happened to their mother and how Rose played a mother role to Maggie, even though Rose wasn't much older than her.
Rose is insecure about her weight, insecure about men and this obviously stems from her mother dying early, her father denying them access to their grandmother and the bullying tactics of her "step monster". Her father is a weak man who married another woman who would always make Rose feel large at a dangerously tender age by denying her ice cream for example, when everyone else was eating it.
Rose knows so much about everyone else but little about herself. When she is asked by none other than Cannie Shapiro, a former Helen's Heroine, what do you like, she didn't know. She knew what made her sister, father, best friend, step mother and once upon a time, her mother, happy. But what made her happy?
In hindsight Maggie's betrayal is probably the best thing that happened to her. It pulls her away from the job that she has been hiding away in, away from the unsuitable man and towards changes she starts to make in her life. Both Maggie and Rose grow and mature, but also, in Rose's case, she becomes less mature (you'll know what I mean when you read it) as she shakes off the responsibilities she has placed, or has had placed, onto her. Allowing her to follow the life that she truly wants.
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