Mercy Street: a journey through Boston’s dusty corners Local author Jennifer Haigh discusses abortion, substance abuse, and mental illness in her latest novel. by Danielle Miller | Design by Anvitha Nekkanti
“When Claudia looks back on that winter (as New Englanders can’t help doing), the days fuse together in her memory…She had no sense, at the time, of forces aligning, a chain of events set into motion. Like everyone else, she was distracted by the snow.” In many ways, Boston is a city that lives in the past. Each day, countless Bostonians bustle down streets named after Franklin, Hancock, and Washington. We pass statues and buildings dedicated to figures of the past that jumble together like the glossary of a history textbook. For the populace in a city steeped to its cobblestones in history, what does it mean to live in the present? What can we see when we turn our gaze from the Boston of yesterday to the Boston we live in today? What troubles pervade our dear city, what are our collective hopes and dreams? Local author Jennifer Haigh seeks to illuminate these provoking questions in her new novel, Mercy Street. Claudia, the story’s central protagonist, works at an abortion clinic in downtown Boston fielding phone calls and checking in patients. She makes her way each morning through a cluster of protestors before spending the day surrounded by expectant mothers and their loved ones. This was not the life she originally planned; she entered the working world as an assistant editor of a lifestyle magazine, a job provided by her boyfriend’s mother. Within a decade, she was divorced and working at Women’s Options on Mercy Street. This drastic lifestyle change, and what precipitated it, are contemplated throughout the book. As an unmarried woman approaching middle age, Claudia struggles to find a purpose for her life in a society that highly values youth, fertility, and motherhood as cornerstones for the feminine ideal. Ever conscious and almost afraid of the impact her decisions can have on the overall trajectory of her life, Claudia is overly calculating when it comes to matters of her heart. After an unstable childhood, she prefers to live her life in organized steps, but this all changes upon her mother’s death just before the novel’s start. Without Deb, Claudia is unmoored. She seeks comfort in an old collegiate vice, marijuana, and is soon connected with Timmy, whose porch light is on even in the darkest hours of the night.
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