Five Tuesdays in Winter (2021) is a short story collection by Lily King that delves into the theme of emotional reckoning, which are the instances that glove the outer appearance but bring a completely different change inside the lives of the characters that go through the themes of love, grief, desire, and moral choice. Throughout the collection, King has the characters as her focus who are at the turning point of their lives: between youth and adulthood, attachment and separation, hope and disillusionment. Her plots are of the nature of the characters’ inner world rather than a big event in the characters’ life, driven by interior change and small decisions that carry lasting emotional consequences.
“Five Tuesdays in Winter” the title story, is about Mitchell, a college professor in his middle age, who tentatively establishes a romantic relationship with Catherine, a girl of much younger age. In their relationship which is developed during five short meetings on Tuesday evenings, they depict restraint, longing, and uncertainty. King gives the impression of Mitchell being a thoroughly self-aware and conflicted individual who is disturbed by the ethical and emotional boundaries he is conscious of, rather than portraying him as predatory. The story is about a desire that is under the control of the conscience, depicting how to be attracted and at the same time be responsible and deny oneself.
Throughout the collection, King similarly deals with the intricacies of love that is less perfect but still true. In the story of “Creatures,” a woman becomes obsessed with a moping baby sparrow, and through the act of caring, she tries to find solace from her loneliness and her emotional displacement. The frail bird is turned into a medium by which the narrator can see her own vulnerability, and this serves as an example to King’s constant preoccupation with the issue of how people project their needs to others—be they human or animals. Similarly, in “Waiting for Charlie,” the grief and guilt of the protagonist combine as she waits for the news after the tragic incident and looks back on how love stays even if there is silence and uncertainty.
Notably, a number of the stories in this book take a look at the relationship between a parent and a child and the silent tensions that exist in a typical family household. In “The History of the Language,” a teenage girl’s relationship with her father is transformed by loss and new intimacy, showing that shared grief can both separate and bring together. King describes family relationships as ones that are not firm but rather depend on time, memory, and unspoken understanding. These pieces of work are against the feeling of being sentimental and instead, depict characters’ love for each other through the tone used which is quite neutral and through the words which are kept back.
The writer’s style is precise, restrained, and emotionally attentive in all her works in this collection. She doesn’t employ any conspicuous plot twists rather she lets the significance come forth from the subtle changes in the point of view and tone. The characters of her books most of the time do not come to their moments of understanding through their deeds but through realization–recognizing what they cannot be, what they have to give up, or what they are finally ready to accept. Both in a literal and figurative sense, winter is a recurring theme that is used as a backdrop for the characters’ emotional introspection and their stillness.
Lily King’s Five Tuesdays in Winter provides a brilliant insightful look into the frailty and moral consciousness of humans. The way King sees love is not as a powerful or saving force but rather as a very delicate, insecure, and humane thing. The collection puts forward the idea of growth coming to a person very quietly and in the moments when one holds back rather than when one is fulfilled, also, the most important changes are the ones deep inside the person’s soul. By closely following the emotional subtleties, this piece of work is an endorsement of King as one of the leading writers of the modern short story genre whose primary concern is the subtle truths of the everyday life.
