Reading The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick from the perspective of an adult woman in 2026 was fun. Some of the expectations placed on women in the 1960s feel almost impossible to imagine today, and others aren’t nearly as far behind us as we’d like them to be.
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The novel centers on four women, each in a different marriage and with varying levels of satisfaction with the lives they’re living. Their conversations begin with literature and segue into questions they’re afraid to ask out loud. Over time, a neighborhood book club becomes a genuine friend group, supporting one another through multiple waves of challenges.
One recurring detail in the novel is a chore calendar that hangs on the refrigerator in each woman’s home, listing the days and times for everything from grocery shopping to vacuuming the curtains. While this seems absurd by current standards, in a pre-internet, pre-cell-phone world, this was a near-guaranteed way to run into your friends or foes. If grocery shopping in the same aisle was a good way to stay connected, it may very well have been welcome. This detail was a clear reminder of how narrowly many women’s lives were expected to unfold.
There are pieces of Viv’s, Bitsy’s, and Margaret’s stories that speak to the decisions we make about our personal, professional, and romantic lives, and who we want to be in each. Each of these women was admirable in her willingness to ask questions that probably weren’t socially safe to ask, or maybe weren’t answered very often in the 1960s. Going back to work, claiming a professional identity, and protecting time for personal work weren’t as common in this time period. Balancing their interests and desires with a mix of spoken and unspoken expectations added pressure, guilt, and a layer of complexity we’ve only partially shed in the last 50-plus years.
The standout, and most mavenhood in spirit, was Charlotte, who stepped out and built something of her own. Opening an art gallery wasn’t just a career choice. It became a place where artists, ideas, friendships, and possibilities intersected. She didn’t continue waiting for life to happen to her; she created a physical and emotional space where other people’s lives could expand alongside her own.
The Book Club for Troublesome Women proved an excellent choice for discussion in our 2026 book club because every woman came away with a different question. Whether our attention settled on Charlotte, Viv, Bitsy, Margaret, 1960s etiquette, or another aspect of the book, we closed it with a different set of questions than the ones we had when we opened it.
Some of the best conversational threads it inspired had very little to do with the plot. What qualifies as abuse today that wasn’t considered abusive in the 1960s? Which barriers to a woman’s success still exist? Are friendships with women more important than a romantic relationship? Those aren’t questions the novel asks or answers outright, and they’re only a few examples of what it invites us to consider. Your questions will be different. That’s the point. That’s exactly the kind of trouble we like
