Staff Reviews & Reader’s Guides
Recent Reviews:
Message form an Unknown Chinese Mother
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The Book of Lies: A Novel (P.S.) by Mary Horlock
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The Magician's Elephant
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The Tiger's Wife
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Enduring Love
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Happens Every Day
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A charmed life in tatters...
Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies Don’t you just love it when a good read comes to you via serendipity? That’s how I happened to bring home Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies. I plucked this memoir off the hold shelf for a patron and then she realized she had already read out copy available at the Emma Andrews Branch. Well, I was looking for interesting, light read and after a quick chat with the patron, I decided to take this small book home and give it a try. The next day turned out to be a rainy Saturday and I picked up this memoir and couldn’t put it down. Isabel Gillies is not my preferred type of memoir writer. I like my memoirists to tell a survival story of wacky, truly dysfunctional family life. Gillies was born with a silver spoon in her self described WASPY mouth. She tells you she and her husband Josiah went to eastern boarding schools and spent every summer of their childhoods on the same Maine island, where they reconnected fifteen years later at a la-di-da wedding. Their future together seemed like it would be oh, so bright and sunny. Isabel’s husband Josiah is a tall and handsome poetry professor (swoon), and Isabel gives up her acting job in NYC and moves with him and their two very young, (blonde of course) beautiful boys to his new professorship at quirky, liberal Oberlin College in conservative, rural Ohio. Isabel becomes a part of campus life, even getting a part time job teaching an acting class. She settles easily and happily into the pretty cocoon that is life in a small college town. I like the way Gillies sets the stage of her back story without bragging and tells her memoir with little to no whining. Gillies admits that she is no writer, but has been known to write some very readable emails. This memoir is just that. It feels like you’re reading a year’s worth of some wrenching emails from an old college friend. For even though Isabel’s husband is handsome, her children beautiful, and she and Josiah buy their dream house near campus and lovingly paper the walls with William Morris wallpaper, none of those facts stop the train wreck that will soon become Isabel’s marriage. Gillies subtitles her memoir “an all too true story” and most women will know that for a fact. When a new English literature, tenure track professor is hired, it becomes the beginning of the unraveling of Isabel’s enviable, charmed life. The new professor is a petite brunette with a slight French accent. Isabel immediately embraces Sylvia into the circle of her friends and family. Gillies feels sorry for Sylvia because she’s all alone at Oberlin while Sylvia’s new husband is back in NYC. Big mistake. Of course, women will know where this story is headed, but it’s the way it all unfolds that makes you keep on reading. Gillies is no Nora Ephron and her memoir does not have the stinging humor of Heartburn, none the less you like Gillies for her honesty about herself and the red flags she should have seen before she fell head over heels and married Josiah. The scene of Isabel on her knees in the snow on the college campus will break your heart a bit. This memoir is definitely not a beach read if you have small children. They will be endangered when you can’t look up from the book to keep an eye on them! Personally, I couldn’t wait to share this story and compare notes with some women friends. This would be a good read for a book group that needs a quick read during a busy season. Guaranteed to strike a chord with women of all ages, especially those with a friend who has been blind sided by love.
