Clarissa and her flowers

In June 2023, my husband, barely 52, was scheduled for surgery to repair a ruptured aorta. Staring down the prospect of spending hours upon hours in a hospital waiting room, I wanted a book that would absorb me. I picked up a battered paperback of Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours from a Little Free Library in my green neighborhood park. It was the 25th anniversary of the novel’s publication, so it seemed a good time to revisit it.

“Are you sure you want to be reading that?” my older brother said. “That doesn’t sound like the kind of vibe you need right now.”

His doubt that The Hours would be a good hospital read stemmed from the very serious thematic spindle around which this lauded novel is wrapped. The book is famously an homage to, and evocation of, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a novel documenting the one long day of the protagonist’s preparations for a party. Perhaps Cunningham’s most audacious turn is to make Woolf’s own life and suicide one narrative strand in its tripartite structure. There are still further echoes: another subplot focuses on an aging New York bohemian woman’s efforts to celebrate the triumph of her old friend and brief long-ago lover, who has just been awarded a major literary prize but is dying in the final stages of AIDS. The third snaps back to 1950s Los Angeles, tracking over the course of a day the advancing anxiety of a suburban housewife, who is uncertain about sexuality, marriage, motherhood—and just wants to find a little time to read.