a short novel, it is written like random thoughts but end up giving us a complete story of marriage that has had it ups and down. the story was told from the perspective of the wife (we never learn anyone's name) and she oftenreferred to herself and her husband in simple terms of wife/husband,and woman/man. she was a writer and like every woman struggled with being a mother, a wife, and also an artist. it's a honest portrayal of how tough it is for women, everyone assume motherhood comes naturally, it doesn't. it also addressed the internal agony women face when choosing to put their family first and their work second, demonstrating it is okay to want to put your work first.
there is an affair. her husband cheated on her. his affair foreshadowed by an anecdote about carl sagan and his wife, ann druyan and how he asked him to marry her while they working on "the golden record" project for nasa. however, i like the intern, was confused because carl was married and ann was engaged. my heart broke when he explained the other girl was easier and of course when he used pronoun.
i like every situation for cheating, want the woman to leave. but they went to therapy or what they called "the little theater of hurt feelings." she confronted the girl which i think she deserved and completely freaked out. in the end, the moved to the country and the things got better. however, i felt bad for the daughter being so isolated.
a beautiful and honest tale about marriage. also, offill is a wonderful writer. some of my favorite instances were:
that one was so beautiful i used to watch him sleep. if i had to sum up what he did to me, i'd say it was this: he made me sing along to all the bad songs in the radio. both when he loved me and when he didn't.
we applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. that all are born radiating light but this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not.) the most charismatic people--the poets, the mystics, the explorers--were that eat because they had somehow managed to keep a but of this king that was meant to have been dimmed. but the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. it hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and the almost always the eyes went dark.
i decided to make my class read creation myths. the idea is to go back to the beginning. in some, god is portrayed as a father, in others, as a mother. when god is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. when god is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.
(this novel is filled with random facts that shed light on the narrator's life. however, when i related to this to myself, it rings true for those raised by a single mother.)
my very educated mother just served us noodles. this is the mnemonic they give her to remember the left of the planets.
(i can't recall how i learned this, but i love subtle dig at gender roles!)
researchers looked at magnetic resonance images of the brain of people who described themselves as newly in love. they were shown a photograph of their beliefs while their brains were scanned for activity. the scan showed the same reward systems being activated as in the brains of addicts given a drug.
(ke$ha was right, your love is a drug.)
this novel is filled with little facts that have deeper meaning for the story, which i adored. i really enjoyed this novel and highly recommend it. it reminded me of one of my favorite novels, the lover's dictionary.
