There is a question hanging over my wife’s new book club: am I in it?
My inclusion so far has been accidental. The inaugural meeting was held in our kitchen and, while my wife made it clear she didn’t want me to go anywhere near it, they had some very nice cheese in there. It turned out I had read the book in question, and even though I couldn’t remember much about it, I still had plenty to say.
In the end I made a bid to get elected club president, only to be told there was no such thing.
“I love my book club,” I said to my wife the next day.
“It’s not your book club,” she said. “You’re not even in book club.”
“I’m in the WhatsApp group, which is the same thing,” I said.
“No it isn’t,” she said.
She’s right – it isn’t quite the same thing. Because I was the only man at that first meeting, my precise clearance level seems unresolved. In subsequent WhatsApp conversations, the word most often used to characterise my status is “mascot”, where I would obviously prefer “founder member”. There have also been suggestions that my participation should be in some way restricted – that I should never, for example, be allowed to choose the book. This is because I’d been slightly overenthusiastic – even a bit insistent – in recommending titles I already happened to own.
“Honestly,” I’d said. “It’s the best book about decapitated 13th-century Welsh monks you’ll read this year!”
Over the next few weeks, depending on the weather in the WhatsApp group, I swing from feeling like an official member to a barely tolerated interloper. No one is calling for my outright removal from book club, except my wife. I have gone so far as to purchase the chosen misery memoir for the next meeting, even though, as I learned from the first meeting, actually reading the book marks you out as a bit of a try-hard.
The week before the second book club meeting, the host, Sash, tries to change it to the following week. Several people can’t make the new date. Someone else suggests having it on the original day, but at a different venue, or possibly the day after. Members vote for one option or another, but nothing gets settled.
“Book club is falling apart,” I write. “This is what happens when you don’t elect a strong leader at the outset.”
“Oh Christ,” writes Sash.
“He hasn’t read the book,” my wife writes. But I have read it. I’ve read all of it. I’ve also read two reviews of it, and watched a number of long interviews with the author on YouTube. I am definitely going to be prepared for book club, whether I’m in book club or not.
Eventually it is decided that the meeting of book club will be held on the original day at the original venue. Sash asks everyone in the group to confirm their attendance. I still don’t know if I’m going, or whether I even should go. It’s my wife’s thing; if she truly wants to oust me, I should probably just let her. But I’m not sure how serious she is. We don’t talk about book club any more, except on WhatsApp.
I don’t respond to Sash’s text that evening, but I watch the other answers trickle in, one by one. There are to be some brand new attendees this time – fledgling members who, I think to myself, will probably see me as a sort of senior figure in book club. If I go.
On the morning of book club I am in my office when my phone pings, heralding a new WhatsApp group message: my wife’s answer to Sash.
“Me + 1,” it says.
I stare at the message for a moment. It seems, for all its brevity, like a terribly gracious way for my wife to approve my membership, and I am unaccountably moved by it. I realise this is the invitation I’ve been waiting for all along. I also realise it’s probably what everyone else was waiting for: a stamp of legitimacy from book club’s real leader. I lean over my phone, carefully composing my reply.
“I would also like to bring someone,” I write.
