Summary: Think “Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple” but with even less likable characters and a lot more masturbation.
I don’t tend to write about books I didn’t finish, but I am going to here. I don’t know why I had this on my list. I am sure I saw someone I know recommend it. But I don’t remember where the recommendation came from. It was at the library and I wanted another fiction book. From the early book I thought it was going to be similar to Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple, and it was, but I thought it might be better, I was wrong.
I am somewhat surprised how many elements were similar between the two books. Both women were facing a midlife crisis. Both had kids with very significant medical issues that contributed to their exhaustion. Both women had not quite lived up to their early promise. And they both run away.
But while Bernadette runs away to experience the world and find herself. But the (unnamed) narrator of this book starts a solo cross country road trips and ends up spending weeks hiding in a hotel room a couple hours from home.
There is something here. The writing is not bad and there are good insights and one liners, but the whole perspective of the main character I hated. Yes she has some trauma and yes she needs to deal with that. She is bored with her life and that female oriented midlife crisis I think could have been well explored. But instead of exploring that well, it became book about being obsessed with a younger man, who was happily married.
I don’t particularly object to sex in books, but I do object to objectification and objectification whether it is of the male or female is distorting. At the point that I really gave up on the book, the narrator had spend weeks longing for this man and they as a couple had spend over a week spending hours a day in her hotel room doing most everything except genital penetration and it was just more than I wanted. She wanted to be obsessed with him and enjoyed the obsession. He wasn’t to not have an affair, because he was happily married, but he liked the attention and was a fan of her work.
When I gave up it was when she had to leave the hotel room and head back home. And she wanted to keep seeing this guy. But the guy didn’t want to keep seeing her. She wanted to keep her husband and family, but also have a guy on the side and for it to just be okay. I glanced around for spoilers to see if I wanted to keep reading and while I won’t share what I found here, I do believe that affairs are bad actually. And I don’t think marriages are made better by being open.
Generally I like picking up books on recommendations and not spending any time reading about them before I start. But the problem with that method of fiction reading is that sometimes I pick up books that if I knew more about them before starting, I wouldn’t have picked them up.