49 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
She "Gets It Right", April 6, 2009
This review is from: Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story (Hardcover)
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I confess that I seek out stories of heartbreaking betrayal. I'm like the ambulance chaser of these kinds of sagas because I've been through it and I'm compelled to hear others' tales. It make me feel not alone in my pain, but I also like to see if the writer "got it right", the unimaginable pain of trusting someone completely and thinking things are fine and then in a matter of seconds having your entire world shattered. The shock alone could kill ya. If this has not happened to you, I'm so glad for you and this book will help you understand what a friend or family member is going through. If you HAVE had it happen to you, this book might dredge it all up and make you sad, but it also might uplift you to know that others know how you feel. It really does happen every day.
So it was that I saw that Isabel Gillies had written a book "Happens Every Day" about how her husband suddenly left her and their two very young sons, and I was compelled to read it. I'm very glad I did. It's wonderfully told; honest and touching. Gillies doesn't wallow in it, and she offers no excuses. She is honest about herself and all the red flags she missed. She even muses on why people in love miss or ignore red flags and clear warning signs...we all do it. It must have something to do with what love does to the chemistry in our brain. Later, after the boom has been lowered on you, the signs are all there - clear as day - only to make you feel like an even bigger fool.
Gillies paints a detailed cringe-inducing description of how she unwittingly befriended and sponsored the woman who "ran off with" her husband. We readers are uncomfortable while reading these passages because we already know that this woman is going to betray her, and we can't warn her...it's too late. It's beautifully done and I admire Gillies for her brutal honesty in the telling. You will become angry and feel protective of her when her husband tries that old: "Do you believe me or your lying eyes?" number on her. Gillies descriptions are vivid and spot on. The room really does spin when you've been leveled a shocking blow. Gillies "gets it".
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33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Heartfelt, June 18, 2009
This review is from: Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story (Hardcover)
Perhaps the academics in this book could have written a more lyrical tome, but this book is heartfelt and poignant at times. Gilles is not the best of writers---she uses too much slang and cliche--but she writes from the heart and that goes a long way. It is a story of a reasonably good marriage that falls apart in a matter of weeks, and for that alone makes it good reading.
As an academic myself, I find it easy to despise the faux-French "other woman." For once she lands Gilles' husband, she becomes a spousal hire at Oberlin and does not have to search for another job. She avoids having to settle for teaching four sections of freshman composition a semester at a third tier university. In my experience, that alone for any fledgling professor is enough to break up a marriage. Now she can concentrate on some drab 18th century research that few outside academia will ever read. The only problem is she is married to a man who clearly has a fear of commitment;he left his pregnant first wife and left his second wife with two very small children for other women. So in one way she is like Sylvia Plath who was married to the poet Ted Hughes, the womanizer who was/is despised by millions, mostly academic women. Unlike Plath, she is like the many women who go after married men, who do not respect women enough to stay away. She may rationalize it as fate, finding her soul mate, something obscurely French about joy, life, love-- but the truth be told, she went after another woman's husband and took him, and even when Gilles begged her to stop, she did not.
For him: he is an average poet and scholar who is at a college with no graduate students. He is married to a woman with a cloying French accent who grew up in Vermont of all places. This may ultimately be a nightmare for a Harvard Phd. Was it worth missing out on the daily happenings of his children's lives? I doubt it.
In academia, after you've seen colleagues scramble to write scholarly books and juried articles for their entire careers, there will be much envy for Gilles' success:
A New York Times best seller, a probable movie deal, a role on a popular television show, and now she is now married to a man who does not have a fear of commitment. Is there an element of revenge in this novel? Yes, probably. But the best revenge is success and Gilles has transcended most academics' dreams. This does not happen every day.
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143 of 177 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Too cute for its own good, April 1, 2009
This review is from: Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story (Hardcover)
I really, really wanted to like this book but two chapters in, I found the author's tone so annoying that I couldn't take it. The phoniness and constant detailing of the haute bourgeois lifestyle and stressing how genteel it all was is just TOO MUCH. Not that there's truly anything that justifies leaving your wife and kids, but my God, could this BE any more stereotypical. Of course the hot professor is up to no good. Of course the catalogue-perfect organic hippie lifestyle is a sham. Most of us figured this out when we were college sophomores. If I had to read one more detail about cheese souffles, summering in Maine, and flower arrangements in Mason jars, I felt like I would start sympathizing with the husband. I really regret not liking this book but I found it frankly irritating.
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