Finished Palin's Diaries tonight. A long book for me (650 pages), but I must say I looked forward to reading it every night before bed these last few weeks. It was fun to read about Monty Python hitting it big, Palin hosting Saturday Night Live, the backstage politics of Python, and Palin's growing family (his three children are around my age). Now I am reading Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies.
From the Book jacket:
Isabel Gillies had a wonderful life -- a handsome, intelligent, loving husband; two glorious toddlers; a beautiful house; the time and place to express all her ebullience and affection and optimism. Suddenly, that life was over. Her husband, Josiah, announced that he was leaving her and their two young sons. When Josiah took a teaching job at a Midwestern college, Isabel and their sons moved with him from New York City to Ohio, where Isabel taught acting, threw herself into the college community, and delighted in the less-scheduled lives of toddlers raised away from the city. But within a few months, the marriage was over. The life Isabel had made crumbled. "Happens every day," said a friend. Far from a self-pitying diatribe, Happens Every Day reads like an intimate conversation between friends. Gillies has written a dizzyingly candid, compulsively readable, ultimately redemptive story about love, marriage, family, heartbreak, and the unexpected turns of a life. On the one hand, reading this book is like watching a train wreck. On the other hand, as Gillies herself says, it is about trying to light a candle instead of cursing the darkness, and loving your life even if it has slipped away. Hers is a remarkable new voice -- instinctive, funny, and irresistible.
2 comments:
I so KNEW you were going to pick this up!
Good call, Don. But I didn't pick up that cooking touchy-feely book that you thought I would.
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