I GET IT! I FINALLY GET IT!!

In her debut memoir, Bines recounts her volatile marriage while pondering the many influences that bound her to her alcoholic husband for so many years.

Bines grew up in a passionate if dysfunctional French Canadian home. Her mother, a glamorous but unstable woman, was a portrait in extremes who modeled the sort of temperamental alcoholic Bines would later marry. Her father, a mild-mannered man, attempted to keep peace at all costs. Bines qualified as a teacher at a young age and saved money to travel extensively with female friends, immersing herself in other cultures and making rounds on the party circuit. Coming of age in the 1960s, Bines cast aside her family’s traditional Catholic mores to explore her sexuality. She dated a series of decent, unremarkable young men before falling for Dick, who was wild and unpredictable, with a penchant for partying and dangerous pranks. Soon she and Dick married and became parents, and after a series of humiliating incidents and brushes with the law (Dick passed out in his dessert plate after dinner with the boss and drunkenly demolished a ticket booth after a dispute with a parking attendant), Bines realized she married a troubled alcoholic. The story begins in medias res, in a lightning quick series of domestic disputes that took place around the time of Bines’ divorce from Dick. The intensity of these reported conversations, coupled with a total lack of context, is initially confusing. As Bines goes on to describe her upbringing in gloriously vivid detail, however, showing how she gained her independence early in life only to suppress it once more in marriage, she provides much more captivating, fluid reading. Bines’ frank conversational style is both humorous and engaging, as when she tells of her halfhearted attempts to join the swinging ’70s with a game of strip poker: “I started crying….One more hand and I was down to my top and quit. I had a hissy fit and walked out of the room and locked myself in the bathroom.”

A charming, insightful account.