Vox Meditantis

What book are you reading right now?

Saturday, 15th November 2025

The question arrived this morning with my coffee, as nosy and well-meaning as a relative at a family gathering who skips the small talk and goes straight for “So then, what’s going on with you?”

What book are you reading right now?

On the surface, it sounds like a harmless enquiry, the sort of thing one asks on trains or at conferences when the alternative is discussing the weather yet again. But in the consulting room, and increasingly in my own life, it tends to reveal more than the casual tone suggests. People rarely answer just with a title. They answer with an aspiration, or a confession, or an apology disguised as a reading list.

Patients will often say, Well, I’m meant to be reading… and then name something improving and earnest, before admitting they mostly scroll through their phones in bed until sleep or anxiety claims them. Friends produce stacks on bedside tables like architectural diagrams of who they hope to become if only they had more time. Even in my own family, Michael has his engineering histories, Susan her exam papers and battered novels, each book a quiet declaration of how they’ve chosen to spend their finite attention.

So when the prompt appeared on my desk – ink slightly smudged where I’d set my mug down too quickly – it felt less like an idle question and more like being asked, Which story are you currently allowing to work on you?

The honest answer is that I’m reading two books, and they’re quarrelling politely on my nightstand.

The first is the sort of text I would happily declare at a professional gathering: a dense, thoughtful volume on community mental health and the architecture of care, recommended by a colleague in Philadelphia who worries, with some justification, that our field is better at writing about systems than building them. It’s full of underlined passages and marginalia, the sort of reading that reassures me I still have my hand on the pulse of contemporary practice even as I spend most days in my Victorian consulting room by the harbour.

The second book is harder to name, not because it’s obscure, but because it’s embarrassingly on the nose.

It’s a novel Jenny pressed into my hands at Riverfront Books last week, after we’d both pretended we were there purely by accident and not because Dan had emailed to say a new shipment of paperbacks had arrived. The cover shows two older people sitting on a porch at dusk, all long shadows and modest proximity. The story, Jenny said, is about late-life companionship – two neighbours who decide, quite against local sensibilities, to spend their nights together simply so they don’t have to sleep alone.

She said it lightly, but she watched me too closely as she spoke, in that way childhood friends can, the ones who remember which books you hid under your pillow at fourteen and which you returned to the school library unread because the feelings they stirred were too big for the life you were living.

You’ll like it, she said. It’s about people who’ve done their duty and then realise they might still be allowed something just for themselves.

I took it home, of course.

There are books we read to become more competent, and books we read to become more honest. This one belongs firmly in the latter category, which is why it’s been both compelling and faintly excruciating to make my way through it.

The protagonists are not especially glamorous. They are, in fact, disconcertingly ordinary – widowed, weathered, shaped by decades of small-town life and its accumulated compromises. They are the sort of people I might see at the Harbourside café on Saturday mornings, or at the chamber music concerts in the old Methodist church, or walking dogs along the riverfront path where I take my own deliberate constitutional. People who have become fixtures, reliable as the tide, without anyone quite asking what they themselves still want.

The novel begins when the woman, tired of her own company and the long ache of empty evenings, walks next door and makes a startlingly simple proposition: Would you like to come over and sleep beside me sometimes? No romance, no declarations – just the honest acknowledgement that humans are not, as a rule, designed to be entirely alone.

I nearly closed the book at that sentence.

It’s one thing to sit in my consulting room and gently ask patients what they need. It’s another to watch a fictional woman approximately my age do something I have spent three decades avoiding – identify loneliness not as a vague atmospheric condition but as a specific, actionable problem, and then make a request that might actually address it.

The story unfolds as you’d expect and also not at all as you’d expect. There is gossip, naturally; small communities have a keen nose for deviations from the script. There are children who disapprove, because nothing unsettles adult offspring quite like the discovery that their parents have inner lives. There is the awkwardness of two people learning one another’s habits without the scaffolding of youth and fantasy.

But there is also tenderness. Not the cinematic sort, all grand gestures and swelling strings, but the kind that looks like cups of tea passed across kitchen tables, or the quiet adjustment of a bedside lamp so that someone else can keep reading while you drift off. The sort that appears in the consulting room when a patient finally risks saying, I don’t actually want to be this strong all the time, and I respond not with advice but with presence.

As I read, I find myself alternating between professional curiosity and something far less comfortable. Professionally, it’s a potent illustration of themes I engage with daily: the tension between autonomy and attachment, the ways social scrutiny can distort genuine need, the courage required to rewrite one’s story after the age when society quietly suggests you should have finished your revisions.

Personally, it’s a mirror I’m not entirely sure I asked for.

I think of David – the man from the harbour café who has become, through a series of cautiously accepted invitations, my regular companion at the Thursday chamber music series. We sit side by side in the old church pews, listening to quartets render sorrow and joy into sound, and afterwards we hover by the doorway, that ambiguous space between public and private, deciding whether the evening ends at the steps or extends to shared tea.

So far, it has occasionally extended. We talk about the music, about books, about New Corinth’s slightly shambolic attempts at urban renewal. He knows I’m a psychiatrist; I know he once wanted to be a musician and instead became something more pragmatic, as so many people do. We know very little else.

The characters in my novel, by contrast, plunge straight into the heart of the matter: the loneliness of widowed winters, the indignity of asking one’s children for company, the quiet terror of dying and having no one notice immediately.

I read a chapter, then put the book down and go to the kitchen to fuss with the kettle, as if boiling water could postpone recognition.

Because here is the uncomfortable truth the novel keeps circling and I keep trying to evade: at fifty-eight, my life is crammed with other people’s stories and comparatively light on my own. I spend my days tending to the narratives of patients, my evenings participating in the communal tale of New Corinth – river clean-ups, Historical Society meetings, harbour walks with Father Walsh, watercolour classes where I remain stubbornly incompetent at horizon lines but increasingly willing to be seen trying.

What I have not, until very recently, permitted myself is the sort of story this book enacts – one in which intimacy is not merely observed, facilitated, or analysed, but actually lived.

There’s a scene midway through the novel that undid me more than any overtly dramatic moment. The two protagonists are lying in the dark, not touching, simply sharing space. One asks the other, in a voice that almost disappears into the night, What are you afraid of? And the reply isn’t death, or illness, or even scandal. It’s being ordinary.

I had to close the book then and rest it on my chest, staring at the ceiling as if it might offer commentary.

Only a few weeks ago, in one of these very entries, I admitted – with some reluctance – that my own most closely guarded fear is precisely that: ordinariness. Not in the sense of status, but in the sense of unprotected presence. Of being loved not for professional usefulness or carefully curated reliability, but for all the ways I am unremarkable and inconsistent and human.

Apparently, my subconscious has acquired itself a book club.

I suspect that’s why I keep returning to the novel in small doses, rationing chapters as one might ration a potent medicine. I read a little before bed, then mark my place with an old museum ticket from the Historical Society – a tiny archive of an afternoon spent helping Maggie plan an exhibit on New Corinth’s shipyard years. I flip the book face-down when I’m done, as if burying the characters might quiet their questions.

But they persist.

What do we allow ourselves, after a lifetime of being useful? At what point does steady presence become, if we are not careful, a form of hiding? How do we distinguish between solitude that nourishes and solitude that numbs?

The book doesn’t offer neat answers, any more than the consulting room does. What it offers instead is a kind of companionship – not unlike the one its characters craft for themselves. A reminder that the questions I’m circling in these pages are not mine alone. That there are, scattered across small towns and harbour cities and anonymous apartment blocks, countless people of a certain age quietly wondering whether it’s too late to ask for more.

This afternoon, between patients, I found myself looking at the shell on my bookshelf – the one a teenager once attempted to purloin before we negotiated the alternative of finding her own. It has been, for years, my private symbol of attentive listening: something shaped by tides and time, carrying the echo of waves even when far from the sea.

For the first time, I wondered what it would mean to choose a different object to sit beside it – something that speaks not of witnessing, but of participation. A ticket stub from the next concert with David, perhaps. A dried petal from the flowers Elena wraps my fennel in at the grocer’s. A paint-smeared scrap from the watercolour class, evidence that I once let myself be bad at something in public and survived.

The book on my nightstand is, in its way, an object like that. A small, concrete invitation to step from adjacency into presence. To consider that the story I’m reading is not entirely separate from the one I’m living.

So yes, that’s what I’m reading right now – a novel about two people who discover, quite late in the day, that being alive and being fully lived are not synonymous states.

Professionally, I can tell you all the reasons it resonates: attachment theory, lifespan development, the neuroscience of connection. Personally, I suspect the more honest answer is simpler and far less dignified.

I’m reading it because, like its characters, I am trying to decide whether the risk of asking for more – more companionship, more reciprocity, more ordinary, unremarkable closeness – is worth the disruption it will inevitably cause to the carefully ordered life I’ve built.

And because, despite myself, I hope the answer might be yes.

The harbour is dark now, the November rain still needling the windows in that determined way it has. In a little while, I’ll make tea, open the book to where I last left those two stubborn, brave people, and read a few more pages of the life they are daring to live.

Then, perhaps, I’ll look at my own and see whether I’m ready to risk a chapter or two of similar courage.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.