Legs Hearts Minds - Chris Jones

 Sub-title: Loss and Its Remedies

I heard about this book from an article previewing its 1st chapter in the Atlantic magazine.  It took a few weeks to get it from the library and I finished reading it in one day.  The author's memoir starts with him finding out his wife is texting with one of his neighbors, her lover, as he watches their exchange on her laptop that he'd borrowed to do some work.  He's a journalist, so he distances from the shock by taking screenshots and confronting her shortly after, declaring their marriage over. He'd recently lost his job and now he loses his wife, his house, half his assets and has to share his children. He's in his mid-forties and no longer can imagine a future. He turns to a life long love, football (actually soccer) and finds a way to go on.

It was a painful, heartfelt, emotional read.  His self-examination unfolds; his grief, loss and reactions are raw and real.  His pain resonated with times in my own life.  A brave deep dive into surviving loss and going on living.

Quotes:

 "When someone falls out of love with you you receive less love.  That's the simplest math of the breakup equation.  But the love you felt before--the amount of love you're ready to give--stays relatively the same.  It's not like it vanishes.  It's part of who you are, a biological measure as quantifiable as your white blood cell count or your bilirubin levels.  I was more than lonely, or the standard kind of lonely.  I had to much love, and I needed somewhere for my love to go."

"I wanted to tell the teenager at the soccer shop that he didn't look brave for not taking cover [during a fierce storm]; he looked uninitiated.  I wanted to tell him that experience sometimes makes you less confident, not more, and sometimes fear isn't a thing you can conquer but a thing you acquire."

"I had taught him, however accidentally, that it's okay to root for strangers, to be lifted or leveled by circumstances beyond your control."

"There is a third option when you choose to love something or someone.  They love you back, deeply and fiercely, but not forever.  One moment they are here beside you and the next they disappear, and not always because they want to go....Monuments are built to love.  That doesn't make love permanent.  That makes love worth remembering."

"We don't remember facts. We remember how facts made us feel."

Published: 2025  Read: July 2026 Genre: Memoir 

Lucy by the Sea - Elizabeth Strout

Looking at YouTube videos of the best books of 2022 from various reviewers, I found this one mentioned as one of the post pandemic themed reads.  I'd read the author's Olive Kitteridge  back in 2008 and enjoyed it.  Her books connect her characters across the stories, Olive playing a minor role in this one.

Lucy, her main character was not someone I liked very much.  She's 60ish and recently widowed from her second husband.  She's an insipid worrier that I thought might be experiencing the beginnings of dementia. The story is told from her point of view, where her first husband, a scientist, insists she and their daughters leave New York as the pandemic hits, taking off for Maine, hence the title.  

It's a painfully reminiscent chronicling of our lives during Covid-19 and there are recognizable reactions to our real life experiences during its scourge.  Her reflective, passive acceptance of what has happened in her life and what happens during their time in isolation is in contrast to the reactions of those surrounding her. 

In the end I found the story soothing and comforting, a looking back on what some have survived. I appreciated the story's handling of our fears and doubts and the changes it as wrought on our ourselves, our families and our lives.

Quotes:

"I had often thought before: that there had been a last time--when they were little--that I had picked up the girls.  This had broken my heart, to realize that you never know the last time you pick up a child."

"My mother, because she was my mother, had great gravity in my young life.  In my whole life.  I did not know who she was, and I did not like who she had been.  But she was my mother, and so some part of me had continued to believe things she had said."

"Because I would never have had an affair, I thought William would not either.  I had been thinking like myself."

Published: 2000  Read: Jan 2023 Genre: Fiction 

The Story of a Marriage - Geir Gulliksen

Ugh, whiny, obsessive, weird husband loses wife to another man.  Not recommended.

Published: 2018  Read: October 2019  Genre: Fiction

Joy Enough - Sarah McColl

This was a book written from grief, a slow unfolding of the relationship between a dying mother and daughter and that daughter and her own soon to be divorced husband.  I got an advanced copy at the Nashville Festival of Books 2018.  It is reflective and dreamlike, struggling to stay afloat while the anchors of her life a set adrift.

Quotes: 

"Our marriage, in the end, had echoed with loneliness.  How many times had we been restaurant silent, the couple that dines wordlessly, then beams up into the server's face at the offer of more water and dessert?  To feel the absence of affection between us where once there had been so much, florid and overflowing - that was lonely.  This was just being alone."

Published:  2018  Read: November 2018  Genre: Memoir

Money, A Memoir - Liz Perle

Sub-title: Women, Emotions, and Cash

Liz got divorced suddenly, becoming a single Mom without an income overnight.  The shock forced her to re-examine her relationship with money.  She realized that she'd been in denial about being financially responsible for herself, hoping to let someone else take care of her and her finances.

She worked in publishing and began interviewing women about the relationship with finances and discovered that many baby boomers had the same expectations and had cobbled their emotional needs together with the financial responsibilities.  Over time she was able to separate the two, and let money just be money, finding her fulfillment in family and friends.

I was saddened to learn that the author died of breast cancer at only 59 years old in 2015.  It was a good read for the interviews with other women and a flashback 12 years to just prior to the 2008 crash.

Published:  2006  Read: July 2018  Genre: non-fiction

After the Fall - Kylie Ladd

A story of two couples where the spouse of one falls for the spouse of the other and the aftermath of the affair.  I liked the style of storytelling, where we learn the viewpoints of each of the four people as they alternately are tempted, suucumb, discover and mourn their relationships.  Worth reading.

Published: 2009   Read: October 2016   Genre: Fiction