"The roads are dark. The air smells of jasmine and moon. Parents become children and children become parents. The membrane between life and death stretches thinner every day, but still we are rich.”
--Melanie Gideon from the Slippery Year
I discovered this series of 12 essays on a year end Best of 2009 list. Ms. Gideon is my age and has an only son and writes of her mid-life crisis year with hilarity and sweetness. The stories and ruminations range from her frustrations with her hair to her husbands purchase of a van to her love of a beautiful king size pillow top bed. Most of the stories center on her love and insecurities around raising her only child, Ben.
Each essay had me both chuckling with recognition but also sighing with delight over a beautiful sentence or thought or turn of phrase. Ms. Gideon has a lovely poetic style. She manages to clamp her teeth into the truth of a modern marriage, so that I was nodding my head in agreement while I read, but she can twist the story back around so that it opens one up to new understandings and possibilities. These essays are the best combination of self effacing humor and great insight and understanding. I understand why it made a best of 2009 list.
Ms Gideon got her writing start penning fantasy novels. If anyone has read her other work I would love to hear about it.
1 comment:
I want to read this also. I wonder if it would be a good one for my sister, but I'd have to read it before I could sent it to her.... MKP
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