A hugely gifted writer, exquisite prose, introspective, brilliant ending.

Reading about the existential crisis of Nora, who is approaching middle age without lover or children was painful but somewhat addictive. Glad I read to the dramatic ending, that was worth it!

Messud is a masterful writer.

This is the story of someone who believes she is not worthy of notice. She believes herself to be part of a class of people who don’t deserve to dream, people who are not memorable, but instead, believe themselves to be unsuccessful, mediocre and invisible in the eyes of the world. This is the story of Nora Eldridge, a single woman, spinsterish, who no longer thinks about a future that includes a happy home, a future that is hopeful and prosperous. She resigns herself to the fact that she is nothing, if not ordinary.
When the Shahids, a Lebanese family, move to town from Paris, temporarily, and their child enters the school system, becoming Nora’s student, she is completely enthralled with them. Reza is 8-years-old. His mother Sirena is a successful artist and his father, Skandar, a very attractive man, is a professor and a lecturer. Nora is a frustrated artist who has never followed her dreams, and she “adopts” this family. Nora begins to live vicariously through her new found friends’ lives and then becomes intimately involved with them. With Sirena, she rents a studio and returns to her creative side, once again making model rooms of famous historic personages, and together, they work on Serina’s latest project, “Wonderland”. One night, believing she is alone in the studio, Nora takes some pretty risqué photos of herself, in conjunction with the room she is building. She is imagining a life for the character who lives in the room she is creating, and she abandons herself to the experience, snapping “out of character” photos of herself, in order to record it.
When Sirena and her family return to Paris, Nora feels the loss deeply. After many years, she visits them there and discovers she was betrayed by Sirena and perhaps, even Skandar. She understands this, at first, as the way “the woman upstairs” is treated, as a non-entity, as someone unnoticed, and therefore, not someone who is thought about in terms of feelings or consequences. She is simply there for their amusement and is unimportant. It is at this point in her life that her anger becomes fierce and palpable, but this anger, rather than creating a sense of depression and helplessness, makes her realize that she no longer needs to be afraid to live, that indeed, she must conquer her fears and forge ahead. She had entertained fantasies about her friend and her friend’s husband and dreamed that their son was hers, as well. She had believed that they embraced her as family, but she had over-reacted, and she had over identified with the Shahids, as she had with others. She had been living vicariously in her imaginings, through the lives of others, rather than her own.
Nora believed we were all lost in a world that wasn’t real, a world of appearances, and she didn’t entertain the idea of hope for a better day, a more fulfilling time in her life, rather she mocked those who told her otherwise, until she was betrayed so completely that her anger finally woke her up and gave her the courage to face life and live. This is a story about a woman who needed to come face to face with the charades that people play and with their disloyalty and phoniness, in order to find the truth and reality in her own life.
The book illuminates how we see each other, each with a different lens. What we see with our eye and feel with our minds and hearts is completely skewed by our personal life experiences and our environment. We all bring a different viewpoint and a different evaluation of situations to the table, based on our pasts. Probably, no two observations or reactions to the same experience or incident will be exactly the same.
This was not my kind of book. There were sexual overtones of deviance that seemed contrived and irrelevant and I did not really identify or become invested in any of the character’s lives. However, the writer has a way with words and that is praiseworthy.

I had great hopes for this book, because it had gotten such great reviews, but I was really disappointed with it, and had to push myself to finish it. If you read the first 2 pages you\\\'ll be able to pick up the gist...Nora says \\\"I\\\'m angry, I did everything I was supposed to, I wanted to be an artist, I was always a good girl, nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I\\\'m gonna go eat dirt.\\\" And after the first few pages, that\\\'s all she keeps on saying. It\\\'s sooooo tiresome and really doesn\\\'t make for an interesting plot. Nora is simply unlikeable, and it\\\'s completely understandable why she is alone as \\\"the woman upstairs\\\". I don\\\'t like reading books like this, because I feel as though my time has been wasted. I don\\\'t know why this book received so many accolades - no one in my book club liked it. But strangely, we talked about this book much longer than any of our recent reads. Of course we were all expressing our displeasure, and saying things like
\\\" she could have used a good shaking\\\".