After a life time of reading British writer, Margaret Drabble, initiated at a small British Council Library in Mexico City, I read "A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman", a collection of her stories. Drabble, now in her 70's has said that she will not write anymore, that at 70 one tends towards repetition. In her day, Drabble wrote the many, many books that documented a generation. In the same way, reading the short stories in this collection gives us a condensed version of a life time, the different stages in the lives of a women of a generation.
It is interesting to observe the development of both Drabble and ourselves in this coming of age and multiplicity of revelations that await for us in any stage of our lives. It is uplifting... and who doesn't need some good news? These good news, like lavendar cupcakes, await for us in the last part of the collection, when after a lifetime of external search, her protagonists make a full circle and find meaning and contentment in themselves, it is a closing worth Drabble, a triple epiphany in the James Joyce style in which the writer, the protagonist and the reader acknowledge that some truths come to us in the convoluted teachings of a life time: and here we are with Drabble or looking at the future through Drabble's excellent and generous vision. There is hope in intertextuality; we might even one day meet a certain Margaret that will teach us about lichen and guide us gently out of a broken heart, a path lost or give us a vision of ourselves in old age full of discovery that we can look forward too.
