Customer Reviews

Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story

5 star:		(77)
4 star:		(52)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

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".

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.

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.

I loved this book. The authors struggle to hold onto her family while it falls apart is gut wrenching. You feel her agony for herself and for her children. Isabel's life is perfect and then it is completely broken. Her telling of her life falling apart around her and her efforts to keep things glued together is compelling and difficult to put down. You feel tremendous passion for the author, you hope that you are able to conduct yourself as well if you are ever in her shoes. Truly a worthy book. Brava!

i read this book probably for the same reason a lot of other people did or will - i heard it reviewed on NPR by maureen corrigan. she said it was one of those you read all at once, because you can't stop - true. i stayed up until about 3 a.m last night with it. there are a lot of reviews that will address the literary value or lack thereof, the writer's skill or lack thereof, and on in that vein. i will let them handle that.

what i find remarkable and frankly incredible is the way this woman - the author - has been able to pull off one of the greatest presentations of cold revenge on a silver platter i have ever read.(something with a fine pedigree, tiffany's perhaps, or the like - if all the label dropping in the book is any indication.) it takes about twenty seconds or less with google to find out the scoundrel's real name and the real identity of the dread other woman. google *their* names and who do you get? isabel gillies. masterful. the husband and his consort, portrayed as such creeps, are english professors both - one assumes a certain love affair with books therefore - and here is the jilted former wife, on the new york times bestsellers list. who knows how that will play out in the future, how the real live sons of the author ( to whom she dedicated the book, another rapier thrust moment, see book) will appreciate or not the public airing of their parents' messy divorce, but that's not anyone's business. unless the author decides to make it so again. i give it five stars just for the audacity. she is an actress, and she seems to be acting herein - isn't everyone's retelling of their own history tinged with more than a little dramatic re-write? but i sit stunned at the aplomb disguised as desperation that it must have taken to avenge her humiliation so publicly. wow. a roman a clef left for them to find after you have gone cold is one thing - one about people with whom you will be dealing for the rest of your life is quite another. i can say i will be curious about how it plays out twenty years from now - again, not really any of my business, but... they say the books are flying off the shelves in oberlin. no doubt!

I heard this book reviewed on NPR one evening in the car. The reviewer said she picked it up from a review stack and finished it before bedtime and the next morning, her husband said he had picked it up and stayed up to finish it in one sitting too. I came home & ordered it that day and did the same thing when it came in.

It is that kind of book - you just want to keep going with it. Gillies' writing is conversational - like a friend is telling you this story of how she made it through a horrible time and came out better for it. She said she wrote the book after emailing and texting friends about what she was going through when her husband decided to end their marriage. She knew he was having an affair and wrestled with believing it and did all those embarrassing things we do when we don't want to give into facing an awful truth.

And, as horrible and humiliating and heartbreaking as her story can be, Gillies is a positive person and she doesn't demonize her ex or make herself out to be a blameless angel. She looks at her own flaws too and always seemed to remember that her ex is the father of her children and a man she loves.

As I read through this book, I kept thinking WHAT IS WITH THESE PEOPLE! We have the husband who is overly self interested and cruel in his way (apologize to Sylvia for thinking I am having an affair with her), Sylvia, the mistress who takes tremendous advantage of Isabel's friendship. And we have Isabel the wife who deliberately throws the husband whom she knows cheated in the past into the path of the mistress who is his type, so she can show the mistress what an ideal marriage is like. Hello! Someone needs to get some sense.

The bulk of the book describes the idyllic life the author thought she had. But her whining about not having tons of money while she describes the expensive wallpaper and the life she grew up in demonstrates a solid need for a reality check of what not having money really means. She runs on about her lofty lifestyle but seems to expect the reader to feel sorry for her as if she was barely getting by financially. Real tough to have to retreat to your parent's New York apartment with a view of Central Park.

Yes the author did some things that drove me crazy. I am all for finding out the truth, but getting on her knees and begging the mistress to leave the family alone, pleading with her husband to not leave etc. was over the top. Her obsessive behavior makes me wonder what she left out?

However, despite the annoying characters, or maybe because of them, the book is very absorbing and an excellent read. It had me thinking whoa...what is with these people long after I closed the last few pages.

Good page turner to pick up. As a side note, if you are a married women and meet an Audrey Hepburn look alike with an outwardly sweet personality and no conscious don't fling her at your hubby.

Statistically speaking, approximately 60% of our population has experienced divorce at least once, so this book hits a resounding chord for a majority of us. What's so admirable about this storyteller's view of her experience is that she's not whinny or punitive, she's just shocked by the sudden change in the structure of her entire life, and struggles to make sense of it.

This is a story about a woman whose fairytale life was cut short by circumstances, human vagaries, and perhaps chance. She tells her story with compassion, understanding and grace.

Happens Every Day is a heart-warming look at love lost, love found, forgiveness and finding joy in the present moment. This is a wonderful, uplifting book.

Maybe this book would appeal more to someone who has been divorced. It does ring true, which is why I gave it three stars instead of two. Many of the actions and emotions described by the author remind me of one of the divorced couples I know. But the truth isn't enough to carry the story for someone who can't relate to it. The hard thing about a memoir is when you say you don't like a character, you're really saying you don't like a person. Isabel Gillies may be a very likeable woman in reality but in the book she's needy and privileged. Summer homes in Maine, Manhattan apartments, Ivy league educations, the money to remodel homes and choose to work - complaints about a salary "under a hundred grand" - but she worries about people mistakenly thinking she has money. It's not classist to say she lacks awareness. She also seems to lack insight into what went wrong in her marriage, leaving the reader as confused as she was. All memoir is one sided, but Happens Every Day take things a bit further. I found myself with a lot of sympathy for her ex, despite the fact that he's a serial cheater.

Isabel holds her parents up as an example of a solid marriage more than once, mourning the loss of the dream as much as the loss of her husband. It's a shock, later in the book, to find she has elder half siblings from her father's previous marriage. She never explains nor explores that relationship. Nor does she explain how her opinions about her own husband's first marriage might have changed after their divorce. She describes a relationship that is suffocating to me. They adopt a pet name (Bully) and then use it to each other so often that even in this short volume I wanted to beg her to stop already. Yes, you call each other Bully. We get it.

This isn't really a memoir about what went wrong between two people, or an explanation of how expectations and realities collided. I'm not sure what lessons are here to be learned. Happens Every Day is a book about how Isabel felt when Josiah left her and how begging didn't change things. It can be summed up in a few short sentences - "I thought he was cheating. He was." or possibly "My husband left me. It sucked." It's obvious there was more to their problems than that, and I don't buy her theory that Josiah just couldn't allow himself to be happy. A far more interesting book might have been how she picked herself up after her divorce and moved on. Happens Every Day just doesn't have enough content to sustain interest.

I've finished the book. It took me three days. I had to pause now and then because there was too much to take in at certain emotional points along the way.

Although worthy of many pages, I've decided a multiple page review won't work.

Critics I think are missing the point. Isabel would probably agree with you that she was too "this," or too "that," and she shouldn't have been such a doormat. (Perhaps her ex-husband can use that line in his next poetry class.) This book was all about the bare honest truth, and how much she loves her family.

I am from Isabel's tribe. Episcopalian. Summer place in New England. People in my family say "humdinger." My father used to rake leaves, even though he could have paid someone to do it. Readers have no idea, given the WASP value for privacy and fabricating cool exteriors, how much writing this book must have cost Isabel.

From Isabel's view of the world, it should be enough to work hard, make commitments and keep them, trust the people close to you, love, tell the truth, and do your best. I happen to agree with her, and I admire her for her for this and what she is willing to pay to try and make it so.

A powerful example is when Isabel gets on her knees in the snow in front of the woman taking her family, and begs her to stop. Isabel's values don't allow for the existence of someone so utterly heartless as to put her own needs before those of a young woman, her family, her children, and her marriage. Surely if this other woman understood what is going on, she would back away. Alas, for the second time in a very powerful five minute span toward the end of the story, she finally comes to realize neither her husband, nor the target of her husband's fantasy are able to care about anyone else but themselves.

Isabel Gillies is a remarkable woman. She is beautiful in every way that could ever be important, and a few more that aren't. Her parents and extended family, her friends, her students, and most of all her boys; they are all very fortunate to share her life and her love.

PS: You will enjoy Isabel's sense of humor, much of it self-depreciating.

She is very kind to the two people who inflicted so much pain (a la Daisy and Tom?). Me, I imagine the two lovers (months after Isabel has moved back to New York), sharing a calm Ohio breakfast, newspaper, and coffee... until the news of another new faculty member coming to the Oberlin Engish department, brings a hint of unanticipated excitement - and not just a little fear - into the otherwise bucolic scene...