An engaging account of an angry, sad, and ultimately triumphant journey to new beginnings.
In this debut memoir, a woman revisits the tumultuous period during and after the dissolution of her 20-year marriage, recalling her struggles to reimagine and reconstruct her life.
In 2009, six years and seven judges after Willett discovered that her husband, Jake, was cheating on her, a divorce decree was issued. She was “fifty-three and unemployed.” She had not wanted the divorce and did everything she could to fight it. Finally, the author did win one battle: She got to keep the couple’s house, a beautiful Victorian brownstone in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. The legal skirmishes surrounding the divorce offer an illuminating backstory that highlights the changing ethos in the family court system of the new millennium. Some readers may see it as a reflection of the “mommy wars” prevalent in today’s social media universe. Willett had given up her own legal career after her first daughter, Nicki, was born. By 2009, she had not held a full-time job for over a decade. For this decision, she received a disturbing, highly unprofessional dressing down by the seventh judge, a woman: “You’ve offended every working parent in the courthouse by becoming a stay-at-home mom.” Four years later, as the couple’s younger daughter, Ella, a high school senior, was preparing to go off to college, the author accepted the reality that it was time to sell the brownstone. Although she had already spent years returning or discarding the things Jake had left behind, she now was faced with dispensing with the plethora of items that can accumulate over more than a decade of living in a large house. The agonizing process of going through every cabinet, stored carton, and piece of paper forms the organizational structure of the intriguing narrative. Each item triggers a series of vivid memories, creating a story that frequently, sometimes exhaustingly alternates back and forth in time. While there are too many details, the articulate prose is solid (“Clutter experts say if you haven’t used something in a year you should err on the side of throwing it out. I could have filled truckloads using that litmus test, but it seemed wasteful. Besides, what if I plain loved something, even if I barely or never used it?”). Readers who have endured “paring down” will find much here that resonates.
An engaging account of an angry, sad, and ultimately triumphant journey to new beginnings.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64293-150-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The acclaimed author of My Own Country (1996) turns his gaze inward to a pair of crises that hit even closer to home than the AIDS epidemic of which he wrote previously. Verghese took a teaching position at Texas Tech’s medical school, and it’s his arrival in the unfamiliar city of El Paso that triggers the events of his second book (parts of which appeared in the New Yorker). His marriage, already on the rocks in My Own Country, has collapsed utterly and the couple agree to a separation. In a new job in a new city, he finds himself more alone than he has ever been. But he becomes acquainted with a charming fourth-year student on his rotation, David, a former professional tennis player from Australia. Verghese, an ardent amateur himself, begins to play regularly with David and the two become close friends, indeed deeply dependent on each other. Gradually, the younger man begins to confide in his teacher and friend. David has a secret, known to most of the other students and staff at the teaching hospital but not to the recently arrived Verghese; he is a recovering drug addict whose presence at Tech is only possible if he maintains a rigorous schedule of AA meetings and urine tests. When David relapses and his life begins to spiral out of control, Verghese finds himself drawn into the young man’s troubles. As in his previous book, Verghese distinguishes himself by virtue not only of tremendous writing skill—he has a talented diagnostician’s observant eye and a gift for description—but also by his great humanity and humility. Verghese manages to recount the story of the failure of his marriage without recriminations and with a remarkable evenhandedness. Likewise, he tells David’s story honestly and movingly. Although it runs down a little in the last 50 pages or so, this is a compulsively readable and painful book, a work of compassion and intelligence.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-017405-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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