With Thunderhead, her third novel, Miranda Darling rewrites Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) for contemporary readers, exchanging the genteel drawing rooms of post-WWI London for contemporary suburbia’s gleaming middle-class kitchens stocked with pricey appliances and organic produce. At the story’s heart is Winona Dalloway, a charmingly anxiety-ridden thirty-something who writes romance novels in harried spurts in between managing her boisterous sons and fielding pushy ALL-CAPS texts from her controlling husband. What the sparkle here conceals is very dark: Winona is a woman who’s learned to watch her step, and her charm, which is so enjoyable, functions like makeup on a bruise. 

Like Mrs. Dalloway, Thunderhead unravels over the course of single day in which the heroine prepares to give a dinner party. But unlike serene Clarissa, Winona is emotionally all over the place. Desperate to please, she twists herself into grotesque shapes and whipsaws between grandiosity and abjection. “I swing long legs from the quilt,” she declares, describing herself as she gets out of bed. But this “bold, decisive movement” only “mimics purposefulness.” When she fails to write, she reports that “my hands shake so much I can’t form the letters” and“my saliva tastes metallic,” a panic that sounds familiar enough. But then, she reports, with irritating preciousness,“my mandible tingles uncomfortably.”

Certainly Winona is odd. She dresses exclusively in denim overalls and fills the pockets with the detritus of motherhood: pens, feathers, lint, and random snacks—“a squashed packet of sultanas, the butt of a baguette.” Drowning in the demands of being a wife and mother, Winona thrashes with a need to convey her specialness. She reports obsessively on her own appearance while noting with acute self-consciousness just where this self-scrutiny threatens to become excessive: she is “quite thin, maybe a little too thin” with “an upturned nose that borders on the elfin.” She likes to wear a pearl necklace that belonged to her grandmother, who had been “a codebreaker in the war.” She too might have been a spy, she says, but her would-be employers “sensibly would have none of it despite a carefully considered Masters degree in all things Military and Strategic.”

Her dilemma comes through in all these randomly capitalized common nouns, ordinary words that are supposed to matter more than the others. This twee gimmick complements Winona’s oddness as yet another way of pleading for special consideration while avoiding seriousness altogether. In much the same way, there is something special about Winona but it’s utterly invisible, with a purely private meaning like that of her inherited necklace, which reminds her “that I am also Other Things when I am at the supermarket or cleaning up the vomit from a rogue lolly binge.” 

This is what her days are like, what any mother’s days are like: stretches of ordinary dullness enlivened by unexpected sudden bouts of labor at distasteful tasks, responsibility for cleaning up children’s messes. In the morning hour she keeps for herself, Winona selects a notebook from a pile by her bed, “for Thoughts that may eventually […] become another book.” Soon enough the peace is broken every day by a ruckus of little boys, “the Small Ones” who wake and “a tiny tornado of little hands and feet sweeps over me.” For breakfast there are “boiled eggs” that are “lined up in their cups like Humpty Dumpties, waiting for the crack of the fall of the spoon; toasted soldiers stand to attention on the plate.” These examples showcase Darling’s command of the everyday and her focused attentiveness to details that convey Winona’s life in all its anodyne stultification. 

Winona’s trad femininity, not to mention her ambivalence about it, make her hard to like, but this not necessarily a strike against her or Darling.  What Darling captures so wonderfully is not just Winona’s near-invisibility to those closest to her but the mad extent to which she has identified with it. Despite her claims to specialness, she feels herself to be a nonentity, “unremarkable,” “I don’t take up much attention or space.” Later she remarks: “You would overlook me in the street.” Others in her orbit are not much more distinct. The children are barely named, and her husband, at least at the start, is merely a “large, sleeping mound under the duvet.” Of the mound she notes only that “[i]t snores,” but this tiny sarcastic note hints at the bigger problem. 

Apart from his initial appearance as a lump in their shared bed, her husband almost always gets the capital letter, the divine pronoun. Winona is His third wife. Significantly, one of her predecessors disappeared at a startlingly young age into a long-term care home, a detail that Winona downplays in her typical rush of amusing storytelling. Her husband gives her a #3 charm for her bracelet, telling her “[t]t’s your lucky number.” Even though her real lucky number is thirteen, “it felt easier to internally drop the 1.” Easygoing Winona charms and amuses—but these skills, Darling suggests, disguise a less pretty reality in which her husband rejects her truths and makes her pay for telling them. Winona doesn’t correct her husband’s idea of her lucky number, for instance, because “I had not wanted the moment to turn like milk in the sun of His smile.” 

The problem, if it is not already clear, is the husband. The creature who starts out as a snoring mound beneath the duvet finally becomes the eponymous Thunderhead. The recognition sadly— and all too realistically—prompts paralysis. Winona’s anxiety worsens. The closer she comes to the truth of her situation, the worse her fears become. She can’t see a plane in the sky without immediately thinking of the Lockerbie crash. Her anxieties foreshadow the crisis to come. The night of the party, something terrible happens that makes it impossible for her to continue to deny the truth about her marriage. What keeps her going is a faith in time as a larger and more compassionate force that anything else in her life. This saving force is less the ticking of her husband’s oppressive stopwatch than the stately chimes that marks the hours throughout Mrs. Dalloway: “I have to have faith that time will order the moments and that by placing one foot after the other, by attending to the practical demands of the day, the moments and hours will take care of themselves.” 

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Miranda Darling is a writer, poet, and co-founder of Vanishing Pictures. She read English and Modern Languages at Oxford then took a Masters in Strategic Studies and Defence from the ANU (GSSD). She became an adjunct scholar at a public policy think tank, specialising in non-traditional security threats. She has published both fiction and nonfiction.

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Diane Josefowicz is books editor at Necessary Fiction and the author, most recently, of Guardians & Saints, a story collection coming later this year from Cornerstone Press.