This was a tough one, emotionally. One True Thing is the story of a brilliant young woman “with her whole life ahead of her” who is guilted by her controlling and emotionally-arrested father into leaving her life behind to come home and care for her dying mother. And it covers so much ground in a very gentle but sad way: gender roles, parenting, family dynamic, literature and poetry, agency, friendship, romance, and ultimately, euthanasia. At the very beginning of the story, Ellen tells us that […]
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
I love Anna Quindlen. I’ve read all of her fiction and followed her Newsweek columns for years. She has an absolute gift for translating the triumphs and heartbreaks of everyday Americans into gentle prose. I was mesmerized by Miller’s Valley, and despite its sad story, it felt like a warm blanket. This is Mimi Miller’s story, as she comes of age in the 60s and 70s in Miller’s Valley, a dying farm community in Pennsylvania. The government, promising progress and recreation, pushes the residents to sell […]