The Woman Upstairs

Claire Messud’s 2013 novel, The Woman Upstairs, plays with the genre of the unreliable narrator, as it is told from the point of view of a middle-aged teacher whose seemingly mild-mannered affect is a veneer that hides oceans of rage and fury. As this woman finds herself enmeshed in the lives of a family of glamorous and seductively alive intellectuals, we watch her descend into obsession and unhinged attachment. Ultimately, there are betrayals on both sides, and we are left to wonder whether we have been reading about a monster, a pitiable victim, or both.

Our narrator is Nora Eldridge, a forty-two-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nora opens the novel with the question, “How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.” According to Nora, she has given up her lifelong dream of being an artist – first because she pursued a safe career in management consulting, and later because she had to take care of her dying mother. Instead of chasing her ambitions, she has grown into a “woman upstairs” – a reliable caretaker and neighbor who is never the star and is ignored until her help is required. She feels invisible, overlooked, and taken for granted as a “good girl” who never makes waves or makes others uncomfortable by demanding that her needs be met. Five years ago, a year after her mother’s death, she had a life-changing, yearlong encounter – and the rest of the novel is Nora telling us about it.



A new boy, Reza Shahid, starts school in her classroom. Reza is adorable and charming, with a foreign lilt to his English and a manner that enchants Nora. When some older kids are mean to Reza on the playground, calling him a terrorist, Nora seeks out Reza’s parents to discuss the situation and apologize. She meets his father, Skandar, a Lebanese scholar at the École Normale Supérleure in France who is spending the year as a visiting scholar at Harvard. Reza’s mother Sirena is an Italian installation artist with a larger than life presence.

Nora strikes up a friendship with the family, which quickly grows into a kind of romantic relationship – at least on Nora’s side. She falls in love with them as a unit, and individually as people. Sirena cultivates Nora’s dormant artistic side and starts to rely on her as a babysitter for Reza. Nora lives vicariously through Sirena’s glamour and starts to fantasize about Skandar.

Sirena invites Nora to share a studio in the town of Somerville – it is a huge space and they can split the rent. There, Sirena works on her next project: an enormous, surreal, and interactive representation of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. Meanwhile, Nora makes tiny, realistic dioramas of the bedrooms of notable women such as Emily Dickinson, Alice Neel, and Virginia Woolf. The contrast between the scales of these works shows the unbridled freedom of the imagination of one woman and the self-limited view of the other.



Soon, Nora is putting her own work aside more and more often to help Sirena with the Wonderland piece. She also has sex with Skandar one random night when he comes to the studio. Nora feels so connected to Sirena that she is on the verge of confessing her feelings – a feeling she explores one night in the studio in a freeing masturbation experience. But as Sirena’s deadline for completing the project approaches, Sirena withdraws further into the world of high art. Nora is once again left behind as the reliable “woman upstairs,” always available to babysit or help out, but never thought of outside of her usefulness.

At the end of the year, the Shahids leave to go back to Paris. Nora continues being buoyed by the feelings of boundary-breaking happiness and expansive freedom to really live that Sirena has brought into her life, never really thinking about what exactly her role in the Shahids’ year in Boston really was all about.

Several years later, Nora visits Paris and goes into a gallery where Sirena’s latest artwork is being displayed. It is a video installation that shows Nora masturbating in the middle of Sirena’s half-built Wonderland project – Sirena had secretly recorded that moment of deeply private expression of liberation. It is unclear if the video was shot as revenge for Nora sleeping with Skandar, or whether he slept with Nora after seeing the video and feeling pity for her. Either way, Nora is destroyed. Shocked by the depth and viciousness of the betrayal, Nora is stunned as all her good feelings towards the Shahids evaporate. Instead of happiness and creative potential, she now feels nothing but rage.



The novel ends as Nora, once again, revels in her anger and outrage, the power of which make her feel just as alive as whatever she experienced when she was with Sirena.

As a woman author writing about an unpleasant woman character, Messud faced a surprising backlash when The Woman Upstairs was published. Particularly famous is an interaction during one of Messud’s interviews about the novel. Asked by Annasue McCleave Wilson from Publishers Weekly, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim,” Messud answered with a thoughtful rebuke that pointed out that male authors never get asked about their monstrous characters:

For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “Is this a potential friend for me?” but “Is this character alive?” Nora’s outlook isn’t “unbearably grim” at all. Nora is telling her story in the immediate wake of an enormous betrayal by a friend she has loved dearly. She is deeply upset and angry. But most of the novel is describing a time in which she felt hope, beauty, elation, joy, wonder, anticipation—these are things these friends gave to her, and this is why they mattered so much. Her rage corresponds to the immensity of what she has lost. It doesn’t matter, in a way, whether all those emotions were the result of real interactions or of fantasy, she experienced them fully. And in losing them, has lost happiness.