"What did my father teach me? He taught me, don't expect too much. We had been in the sunroom when my father first told me this. I was just twenty, too old for some things, too young for others. Same as any age."
~ Jeanne McCulloch
All Happy Families
I finished All Happy Families over the weekend. I liked it, but it didn't sit well with me the way the author pries and prods into the marriages of her parents and her in-laws, and then just glosses over her own, which also failed. For that reason, it lacked the honest self-reflection that I think is a must for an authentic, compelling memoir. She took everyone to task, but herself.
Then I picked up The Good Girl despite the fact that I read the jacket and thought I'd return it without reading it. I got sucked in stat by the short chapters from different POVs and the familiar Midwest setting. It will be a quick read.
Last week I finished The Wife. I read it because I wanted to see the movie. I'm thinking I'll pass now and wait for it to come on ppv. This is the only line that gave me pause:
"Maybe that was what it was like to be a writer: even with the eyes closed, you could see."
Joan's personality and her actions just don't make sense to me. They're juxtaposed. Given her steely sense of self, I found her subjugation unbelievable and her situation implausible. Not to mention, they were both terrible humans. I couldn't sympathize with her any more than I could with him.
In between, I've been slowly making my way through Deborah Levy's The Cost of Living. It is touching lots of nerves. For example...
"My own unhappiness was starting to become a habit, in the way that Beckett described sorrow becoming a thing you can keep adding to all your life...like a stamp or an egg collection."
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