Look at Me Now

By Thomas J. Hubschman

"I stand holding the Macy’s bag half full of the few last dear things I dare take with me. I avoid his big green eyes made twice as large by the thick glasses he’s worn since adolescence. I’d see too much in them, too much of myself, of us. I’d see twenty-three years and not all of them bad. I remind myself I’m not leaving because I don’t love him anymore but because I do, because love, what’s left of it, is my shackle. If I stay I can only be who he wants me to be, and even then only when he wants me to
be it."

Look at Me Now is the story of a woman struggling to begin a new life after twenty years married to a brilliant but overbearing man who has dominated every aspect of her existence. Her struggle involves not just creating a new life for herself but coming to grips with the past that has made her who she is—and isn't: an abusive, philandering mate, an early pregnancy that caused her expulsion from an elite New York high school, a mother who has remained largely unsympathetic.

But Deirdre Davis is nothing if not a woman who can laugh, or at least smile, at her fate and find sympathy with others’—the crippled survivor of a marital suicide pact, a flaky boyfriend, the son whose conception she has spent most of her life blaming for all the bad things that have happened to her. Meanwhile, the husband she thought she had escaped keeps popping up, usually to terrorize her but eventually in a denouement that shows Deirdre's struggles toward becoming her own person have not been in vain.

"Look at Me Now is a book you shake your head at: This can't have been written by a man! But the author really is a man--a man gifted with sensitivity and depth that allow him canny insights into a woman's soul.”
- Anjana Basu, author of Curses in Ivory (HarperCollins)

“A novel of gaining strength as an independent woman, Look at Me Now is inspiring and entertaining, highly recommended.”
- Midwest Book Review

“In Deirdre Davis, Thomas J. Hubschman has given voice to a complex, flawed, ultra-real heroine who compels us to be not only captive to her story but complicit in its outcome."
- Richard Cumyn, author of The View from Tamischeira (Dundurn Press)

Thomas J. Hubschman is the author of Song of the Mockingbird, My Bess, Billy Boy, Father Walther's Temptation, The Jew’s Wife & Other Stories and three science fiction novels. His work has appeared in New York Press, The Antigonish Review, Eclectica, The Blue Moon Review and many other publications. Two of his short stories were broadcast on the BBC World Service. He has also edited two anthologies of new writing from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Savvy Press
• Release date: Nov 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465818393

Thomas J. Hubschman

Thomas J. Hubschman ([e-mail]) is the author of Look at Me Now, Billy Boy, Song of the Mockingbird, My Bess, Father Walther's Temptation and The Jew's Wife & Other Stories (Savvy Press) and three science fiction novels. His work has appeared in New York Press, The Antigonish Review, Eclectica, The Blue Moon Review and many other publications. Two of his short stories were broadcast on the BBC World Service. He has also edited two anthologies of new writing from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, which remains his chief inspiration

Book preview

Reviews for Look at Me Now

[lschwoob_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I agree with some of the other Early Reviewers; I wanted to like this book, but I found it odd that a man wrote a book about a woman who is leaving an abusive relationship. Leaving such a relationship is probably one of the hardest decisions a woman must make. I expected Deirdre to have more substance as a character; just what substance has been hard for me to pinpoint.Deirdre tries to find her way in the world after living with an abusive husband. She also facing the resentment she feels towards her mentally ill son. She acknowledges her husband's mistakes and gains a better understanding of the reasons for his abusive behavior and I would like to think she has arrived at forgiveness. However, I am not convinced that Deirdre is completely healed from her bad marriage and her resentment. After years and years of living with an abusive relationship it is hard to get her life back.The book is not a bad read; it takes very little effort and it actually reminds me of some other fiction about flawed, abusive males. I would recommend it.

[whitreidtan · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This novel opens with Deirdre making the final preparations to leave her husband. He has been mentally and emotionally abusive to her for years but she has been trapped in her marriage by her feelings that she deserved her situation after getting pregnant and having to marry while still in high school. Deirdre's life has been a fairly pitiable one; she's essentially friendless, stuck in a dead-end job, trying to extricate herself from a loveless marriage, distant from her emotionally frozen mother, even unconnected from her lover. Certainly this all should combine to make the reader cheer her on as she starts a new life for herself. But it doesn't. Perhaps it is her all pervading depression leaking through or perhaps it is the small ways in which Deirdre is not entirely convincing as a woman but connecting with this character is difficult. Her life is so dreary that reading about it becomes a dispiriting adventure. And Deirdre's odd decisions, to pretend a closeness to the paraplegic wife of her super, a woman she's never met, her decision to visit and care for her abusive ex-husband after he lands in the hospital, and other assorted small choices like these do not serve to make the reader understand her better but only add some movement into an essentially stagnant story. Over all, I was greatly disappointed by this book.

[veracity_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the story of Deidre ending her abusive, violent marriage and reclaiming her life. She has to sneak her belongings out of the house, bag by bag, keeping them at work so as not to alert her controling husband whom she always calls by his full name, Tim Davis, to her planned escape. But he still turns up at her workplace, threatening by his mere presence. Deidre has a fractured and co-dependent relationship with her schizoprhenic son, both blaming him for not leaving her marriage sooner, and using his mental instability as an excuse for staying. Having witnessed my mother leave a violent relationship and her very real and justified fears about the consequences of doing so, I can testify to the verisimilitude of Deidre's situation; I found her a very real and engaging character in an extremely well written book. Highly recommended.

[bedofroses_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The character of Deirdre Davis is not one I especially liked. From the synopsis, I pictured a character caught in a bad situation, finding the strength to get out and find her own way. I wanted to support her, to cheer her on as she found ways to make it on her own. In the end, I was disappointed. I couldn't relate to Dierdre and her decisions seemed awkward and strange. The author didn't seem to convey the abuse adequately to explain her actions. I also found it distracting that the book was written by a man but narrated in the first person from a woman's point of view. This should work, but for some reason it didn't in this book. The writing wasn't terrible and I did read the whole book, but I felt that it fell a little short.

[woodsiegirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I didn't have high expectations of this book - from the blurb, it looked a bit mawkish - but I was very pleasantly surprised. This is a very well-told tale of a woman trying to escape a life-long abusive marriage, one she has been tied into since becoming pregnant aged fifteen.I thought the description of the husband's abusive behaviour, both towards the protagonist, Deirdre, and her schizophrenic son, was very well handled. He is not described as being physically abusive, but extremely mentally and emotionally abusive. The main interest in the story came, for me, from seeing how marriage to this domineering bully had affected Deirdre long-term.I really liked the character of Deirdre - she was not always likeable, but always believable. Her relationship with her mother - a cold, distant woman - is also well drawn, as is the deterioration of her new relationship with a man she'd thought of as her salvation.My main quibble with the book - which cost it half a star in my review - is that the ending is very contrived. I'd wanted to see more of how Deirdre managed to escape her ex-husbands influence, but what actually happens (without wanting to give any spoilers here!) feels like a cop-out.Overall, a very enjoyable, well-written novel. I'll be looking up more of Thomas J. Hubschman's work.

[elkiedee · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Deirdre Davis leaves her husband after 20 years of marriage to start a new life in her late 30s. Can she leave the past behind and escape the hold he has on her.I thought this book was a bit strange. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to read it when it arrived, but once I opened it, it held my interest and I finished this short novel very quickly.The writing was good enough to make me want to keep turning the pages, although I was most struck by the early remembered scenes in which Deirdre remembers being expelled from school for being pregnant. She got married because of the baby, who is now grown up and has left home.As the story developed though, I didn't find her a very likeable person. I sympathised with her leaving her husband, but she was very down on everything in her life - her job didn't seem as bad as she thought it was.I was also put off by the inclusion of a lot of masturbation scenes, not because I'm prudish but they just seemed a bit superfluous.I wondered if the book had had a proper editor or someone with some critical distance to suggest improvements to the manuscript - I think there was potential in this novel which isn't realised.

[wendyrey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A woman finally manages to escape from an abusive marriage. Over the following few months she thinks about the past, her relationship with her parents, husband and son and the events that brought her to her current state. she forms and loses new relationships of love and friendship. Throughout the book she refers to her husband by his full name Tim Davies rather than just Tim so distancing herself from him and their relationship, I found this compelling and a reflection of one of the many ways survivors of abuse distance themselves from and cope with the memories of abuse. The book ends with the death of her promiscously unfaithful husband of an uncontrollable infection sugesting, to me at least , the prospect of an HIV related illness. A well crafted book that reaches into aspects of leaving an abusive relationship that, having survived a comparable situation, seem realistic. Quibbles (I do nit picking sometimes), a touch too much sex, notablely masturbation to ring true, a few (very few) impenetrable Americanisms, mainly figures of speech that fortunately could be skipped without loosing the thread.Enjoyable intelligent read.

[tpausilver · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Look at me now tells us the story of Deirdre Davis as she leaves her husband and tries to manage on her own. There are three aspects of this book I'd like to discuss: the character, her relationship with her husband and the execution of the novel. This review may contain spoilers.THE CHARACTER"Look at my now" is, essentially, a study of Deirdre as a character. The first thing I would say is that you shouldn’t expect to like Deirdre. Maybe this is just me but she wasn't a character I found myself liking, not even in spite of myself. She is well drawn out and complex and a lot of skill has obviously gone into making her character, but I can't get over the fact that there was not one moment I liked her as a character. Ok, one moment. For one moment I felt like I understood her and liked her, then she remembers a time her husband raped her and she enjoyed it and I lost her again. Maybe one of the things I dislike about her is her contradictions. Through the novel Deirdre contradicts herself often, which I suppose is normal and human but as she never seems to notice these contradictions herself and they are often slipped in with no context or discussion they are a little jarring. The major example I can think of is if she loves the husband she is leaving or not. At the start of the novel she tells us that though she feels so has to leave him or she'll forever be just his shadow she still loved him and then later in the book, after no meditation, she calmly tells us in passing that she doesn't love him and this isn't thought about or brought up again. Maybe it's just me but deciding you do or don't love someone is something major which requires at least a little thought. If she still loved him at the start of the novel, I would have thought realising she didn't love him would constitute a plot point myself. Another of Deirdre's contradictions is her sexuality. Again, it just needed more context. We learn that Deirdre is a highly sexual woman. She masturbates frequently yet she seems hostile whenever her husband approaches her and, again, no context is given. All it needed was a few lines about what makes him different, there are many valid reasons, the problem is we don't know which reason is 'true' and knowing why people do the things they do is pretty important to building an idea of their true character and relationships. Anyway, to give Deirdre as a character a little conclusion, she is in fact a complex multi-faceted character, this just doesn't always come over in the text and she also tends, at least in my reading, to lean more towards annoying then sympathetic, but that is a very personal opinion. THE HUSBANDNow, this is something I'm a little reluctant to discuss but there was something about Deirdre and her husband's relationship which supposedly prompted her to leave him which didn't ring true. We're told that he dominated her entirely, yet we often see Deirdre holding her own. We see her hold her own against her husband when he comes to her office, against her co-workers, against her new lover, to officials and to her son. I feel a lot of this could be tackled with some more fleshing out of their relationship, or at least some more extrapolation of her thoughts. How powerless she feels when faced with him, how he disregards her. We know she has the strength to refuse to sleep with him and move into her son's old room, to take lovers behind his back, and most of the time he's portrayed as casually cruel and infuriating but not dominating. I'm not sure, it's hard to explain but something about the entire thing doesn't sit right, particularly at the start of the novel. The thing is, she could leave him for any reason. He doesn't have to be domineering, she could have simply left because she was sick of his serial cheating, because she'd falling in love with someone else, because they never talk any more, it doesn't have to be earth chattering but the reason we're given is because he's dominating towards her and it just never seems right. THE BOOKNow, the structure of the book. I had issues with how the book was written. Little things that nagged at me and threw me out of the narrative and that is never a good thing. The first thing I want to say is that not all first person narratives have to be diaries. This book is a first person narrative which is fine, I love first person, but it's mentioned about three times, maybe implied a few more, that the novel is, in fact, a series of diary entries by Deirdre. The novel does not read like a diary. You want it to be a diary, fine, but it needs to read like one. It needs to be the kind of account you would write about your day at the end of it. That means it's going to be sparse on dialogue, it's going to lean heavily on feeling and interpretations of the person recording the events. This book did not do that. It just smacked of insincerity to me. I wouldn't have questioned the novel as a first person dialogue, presumably being related at a later date to some unknown listener; it was the vague attempt to make it a journal and the messing up of that which really annoyed me. Another rather major point that kept nagging at me, I have no idea when this novel is set. The only context I picked up in terms of time period is that when she was pregnant as a teenager 20-something years ago abortion was illegal, but I don't know the date of Roe vs. Wade of the top of my head so that wasn't too helpful. The thing is, this is essentially a novel about marriage and breaking away from it and people's attitudes to marriage and divorce have changed drastically so unless I can put it in a time context it makes this novel very hard to, well, understand. We get a few random scenes too. Now, not everything in a book has to be directly relevant to the main plot, but there had better be a reason for everything in there. It needs to teach us something about the character, or about the context or the back-story. There were at least a couple of scenes I read and didn't understand why they were in the book, or at least not just mentioned in passing with a little analysis as a journalist would probably actually record them. A few more small things. Deirdre consistently refers to her husband by his full name rather than just his first name, which I just found odd every time she did it. There's a sex scene where she refers to her lovers penis as his organ (it's a penis, the author had no trouble using the word vagina so why not call the penis a penis). I had trouble with the way Deirdre interacted with other women. Maybe it's just me but, hell, I'm a lesbian and I don't identify the women who live around me by the qualities of their asses and breasts, but Deirdre seems to. It was just a little jarring. I'm not sure this is something worth complaining about but it made me uncomfortable, at one point Deirdre goes off on a monologue about how all other women hate men and are so sexist and just complain about men all the time and how this is as bad as institutionalised sexism (thought sexism as an institute is repeatedly acknowledged in how her husband's career was put before hers). She also takes the opportunity to note that black people can be racist to!!!!! This is only something I’ve ever heard said by people who go on to prove themselves incredibly prejudiced against black people. Prejudice and institutionalised racism is not the same. One last thing, a side character and I suppose it’s nitpicking at this point but he made me angry. One of her co-workers who helps her home from an office party is gay but he acts straight until he gets into his apartment which is fabulously decorated and he drops his...I think hetero-persona was the term used...and become fabulously stereotypically gay, making her herbal tea and having hobbies as diverse as interior decoration and fashion. It just made me mad. As though it’s saying all gays are stereotypes on the inside. They might look normal in society but get them alone and the men will be wearing dresses and the women will be smoking pipes or something. CONCLUSIONSAnd if I don’t stop soon the review will be longer then the book. I found this book difficult and have to admit that in the main I didn’t like it. I feel that some issues with the how the story was written and the background have essentially blurred what could in different circumstances have been a very powerful story, and I can’t help feeling that a few of the things I’ve noted above are things a good editor should have also noted. Deirdre was a complex, conflicted and interesting character, but she was also unpleasant and, at time, offensive and as I had trouble grasping her as a character and fitting what I saw of her into what I was told about her I never really understood her or cared about her deeply, and in a novel which is essentially a character study that’s quite a problem.