Film Society

Susan Patrick is a librarian at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Film Society tells the stories of seven very different women at midlife,
all of them friends living in a small town in Ontario. The novel takes
its title from their regular gatherings, ostensibly to watch videos, but
really to catch up with each other’s dramatic and complicated lives.
As they reflect on their current situations, their pasts are also
revealed. All have reached a turning point in their lives: their next
actions, by turn encouraged or discouraged by their friends, are
crucial.

Sadie, the narrator, is a divorced woman and single mother who likes
“bad boys.” She obsesses over current and past relationships, trying
to decide if she will stay with a younger man who has commitments
elsewhere. She literally wears her heart on her sleeve with her
“storyteller’s jacket” made of bits of clothing stolen from
lovers. Unfulfilled and unhappily married Alex suspects her painter
husband of having affairs with his nude models; she has an affair
herself, only to realize some truths about her marriage. Del takes
personal risks to make her first documentary film about women coping
with their mothers’ deaths. Sally, a florist and single woman with a
telephone lover in Hawaii, is still grieving for her parents (who were
killed in a car accident years before), and must decide if she should go
to visit her lover in person. Grace, a married woman obsessed with her
obstetrician, decides to give up her job to write a novel. Jenny, who
has left an abusive husband, and has had a troubled relationship with
her alcoholic mother, is forced by her friends to confront her own
alcoholism. Storm begins a friendship with a tenant who is trying come
to terms with the death of her married lover.

This fine novel features richly detailed situations and a cast of
fascinating characters whom the reader comes to know well and care
about.