100 Kick-Ass Female Characters: #12
12. Sarah Pierce, as seen in the novel Little Children by Tom Perrota and the movie Little Children, portrayed by Kate Winslet
I don't have children, but a frequent complaint I hear from friends who have children and are stay-at-home moms is, "You have no idea how absolutely boring it can be." It isn't that they don't love their children; they do. But spending the majority of your day with a child leaves you with a lack of adult conversation, a focus on all things childish, and, as you slip further and further away from the person you were pre-children and pre-marriage, you start to have these moments of, "This is not who I am. This is not my life."
This is the predictament Sarah finds herself in. She marries a man she isn't horribly attracted to because she did not believe anyone would ever want to marry her; she was a graduate student in English and thrived on intellectual discourse but now spends her time wrangling her toddler daughter, whom Sarah doesn't feel she fully relates to, and the other mothers at the playground don't care for her at all. And when she meets Todd "The Prom King" at the playground, Sarah is initially just looking for a friend and perhaps the chance to show up the other moms. But when her affair with Todd starts, Sarah simultaneously begins to find her way back to herself and slip further and further from what it is she wants.
There are more subplots in the book and movie (I recommend the book first; the characters are much more fleshed out), but Sarah and Todd's relationship is the focal point. Sarah wants rescued from a boring existence; Todd wants to escape responsibility. Generally, whenever a woman has an affair in pop culture, there's a backlack: the husband finds out, the family falls apart, the lover ends up murdering the husband or vice versa. But there is no backlash to Sarah and Todd's affair; for Todd, it crystallizes why he wants to be with his wife, and for Sarah, it wakes her up to the fact that she's deeply unhappy in her life and needs to make a more permanent change.
Sometimes doing the wrong thing can be absolutely enlightening, which is what Sarah realizes, and that's pretty kick-ass.
I don't have children, but a frequent complaint I hear from friends who have children and are stay-at-home moms is, "You have no idea how absolutely boring it can be." It isn't that they don't love their children; they do. But spending the majority of your day with a child leaves you with a lack of adult conversation, a focus on all things childish, and, as you slip further and further away from the person you were pre-children and pre-marriage, you start to have these moments of, "This is not who I am. This is not my life."
This is the predictament Sarah finds herself in. She marries a man she isn't horribly attracted to because she did not believe anyone would ever want to marry her; she was a graduate student in English and thrived on intellectual discourse but now spends her time wrangling her toddler daughter, whom Sarah doesn't feel she fully relates to, and the other mothers at the playground don't care for her at all. And when she meets Todd "The Prom King" at the playground, Sarah is initially just looking for a friend and perhaps the chance to show up the other moms. But when her affair with Todd starts, Sarah simultaneously begins to find her way back to herself and slip further and further from what it is she wants.
There are more subplots in the book and movie (I recommend the book first; the characters are much more fleshed out), but Sarah and Todd's relationship is the focal point. Sarah wants rescued from a boring existence; Todd wants to escape responsibility. Generally, whenever a woman has an affair in pop culture, there's a backlack: the husband finds out, the family falls apart, the lover ends up murdering the husband or vice versa. But there is no backlash to Sarah and Todd's affair; for Todd, it crystallizes why he wants to be with his wife, and for Sarah, it wakes her up to the fact that she's deeply unhappy in her life and needs to make a more permanent change.
Sometimes doing the wrong thing can be absolutely enlightening, which is what Sarah realizes, and that's pretty kick-ass.