SuitabookThe leaving year
Pam McGaffin
- Reading
- Read alongside a conversation about waiting, family stories and how people create meaning from uncertainty. The historical setting and the narrator’s changing self-image may offer useful discussion points.
- Themes
- Waiting and absence: The narrator waits at the port for her fisherman father and builds rituals around possible homecomings, while her mother appears tired of the fishing season. Waiting is presented as both intimate and wearing: the narrator invests it with love and meaning, but also experiences summer as emotionally confining.
- Meaning-making and self-discovery: The narrator keeps a homecomings binder, tests radio songs as omens and weighs conflicting explanations about her parents and her own name. The book appears to take the narrator’s meaning-making seriously while allowing uncertainty, presenting identity as something explored through memory, stories and interpretation.
- Growing up amid social judgement: The author places friendship, first love, self-image and prejudice within a coming-of-age story set in the 1960s. The book’s stance on this remains unclear.
- Worth knowing
- The opening includes an absent parent, a moody mother, worry about a fisherman’s return, a death-related dream and references to loss, prejudice and first love. The complete intensity and outcomes remain unclear.