What if you were married to a wonderful husband for twenty-eight years but in love with another man? What if you were in love with them both?
Annabelle McKay knows she shouldn’t have any complaints. She’s been in a stable marriage that’s lasted almost three decades and has provided her with two wonderful children, thousands of family dinners around a sturdy oak table, and a husband so devoted that he schedules lovemaking into his calendar every Wednesday morning. Other wives envy the fact that Grant is not the type of man who would ever cheat on her or leave her for a younger woman. The trouble is Annabelle isn’t sure she wants to be married to Grant anymore. The trouble is she’s still in love with someone else.
In the early tumultuous years of her marriage, Annabelle carried on a clandestine affair with the one person whose betrayal would hurt her husband the most. When it ended, she and Grant found their way back together and made a pact that they would never speak of that time again. But now years later, with her children grown and gone, and an ominous distance opening between them, she can’t help but remember those glorious, passionate days and wonder if she chose the right man.
Then, when called to New York City to help care for her pregnant daughter, Annabelle bumps into her old lover. Offered a second chance at an unforgettable love, she must decide between the man who possesses her heart and the husband who has stood squarely by her side. A journey into the what-ifs that haunt us all, The Stuff That Never Happened is an intricate, heartfelt examination of modern marriage that brims with truths about the nature of romantic love.
"[A] deceptively bouncing, ultimately wrenching novel [that] will grab you at page one....The phrase 'summer read' seems invented for this debut." —People
"Nicely written...enjoyable prose and keen characterization." —Publishers Weekly
“Both tender and exquisite, Maddie Dawson’s triumphant debut, The Stuff That Never Happened, is a pitch-perfect look into the choices we made in our past and the consequences that they carry long into the future. I loved every page.” —Allison Winn Scotch, New York Times bestselling author of The One That I Want "The Stuff That Never Happened is unlike a lot of novels I read - I was never quite sure what was going to happen, and in that way, I found it compelling and compulsive to read. Often when I'm halfway through a book, I'm fairly certain of the characters' paths. This time, the lives encountered were surprising, illuminating, and always believable." —Susan Straight, author of A Million Nightingales
“What a joy it is to discover Maddie Dawson. In the best storytelling tradition of writers like Elizabeth Berg and Anne Tyler, Dawson delivers a fast-paced, unflinching, often hilarious novel about the challenges of love, parenthood, and staying true to yourself in a marriage.” —Holly Robinson, author of The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter: A Memoir
“'I can admit that I went there hungry for the drama of him, that I craved that heightened sense of loving and being loved again,' Maddie Dawson's middleaged heroine confesses. In trying to make sense of one married woman's relationship to her old flame, The Stuff That Never Happened is a paean to family happiness as much as romance.” —Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing
I grew up in the South, born into a family of outrageous storytellers--the kind of storytellers who would sit on the dock by the lake in the evening and claim that everything they say is THE absolute truth, like, stack-of-Bibles true. The more outlandish the story, the more it likely it was to be true. Or so they said.
You want examples? There was the story of my great great aunt who shot her husband dead, thinking he was a burglar; the alligator that almost ate Uncle Jake while he was waterskiing; the gay cousin who took his aunt to the prom, disguised in a bouffant French wig. (The aunt, not the cousin.) And then there was my mama, a blond-haired siren who, when I was seven, drove a married man so insane that he actually stole an Air Force plane one day and buzzed our house. (I think there might have been a court-martial ending to that story.)
And in between all these stories of crazy, over-the-top events, there was the hum of just daily, routine crazy: shotgun weddings, drunken funerals, stories of people's affairs and love lives, their job losses, the things that made them laugh, the way they'd drink Jack Daniels and get drunk and foretell the future. There were ghosts and miracles and dead people coming back to life. You know, everyday stuff.
How could I turn into anything else but a writer? My various careers as a substitute English teacher, department store clerk, medical records typist, waitress, cat-sitter, wedding invitation company receptionist, nanny, daycare worker, electrocardiogram technician, and Taco Bell taco-maker were only bearable if I could think up stories as I worked. In fact, the best job I ever had was a part-time gig typing up case notes for a psychiatrist. Everything the man dictated bloomed as a possible novel in my head.
Still, I was born with an appreciation for food and shelter, and it didn't take me long to realize that coupling a minor in journalism to my English degree might be a wise move, even though I had never for one moment felt that passion for news that my newspaper colleagues claimed beat in their breasts. I am famous for raising my hand in Journalism 101 and saying, incredulously, to the professor, "You don't mean to tell me that every single detail in the story has to be true? Every one? Really?"
Learning to write only truth was a tough discipline, and as soon as I could, I left the world of house fires and political scandals and planning and zoning commission meetings and escaped into a world of column-writing, and then, magazine writing. (Way, way better to be assigned to think of 99 ways of getting him to declare his love, than to have to write about the bond proposal for the sewer lines.) But all along the way, in between deadlines and raising three children and driving them to their sports games and tucking them in at night and doing the laundry and telling them stories, I was really writing a novel about marriage and relationships and the way regret has of just showing up alongside your life, just when you think things are as rosy as they could be.
Today I live in Connecticut, and spend part of every day on my screened-in back porch with my trusty laptop, writing and writing and writing, looking out at the willow tree and the rosebush and the rhododendron that has a nice nest of cardinals, who I imagine to be yelling at me to get back to work whenever I wait too long to write the next sentence.
The lakehouse is gone now, and many of my more outrageous story-telling relatives are telling stories to the angels now. But even though I'm far from home, and far from the stories that nourished me in the beginning, I can still hear their voices on the breeze, still recall the buzz of the Air Force jet that had come to take my mother away until my father stepped in and said: "No. No. She's mine."
Wait. Is that what he said? Or was he not home that day? You know, now that I think of it, it might have been just my mother and me at home just then, running outside in our excitement, my mother's cheeks burning red, her eyes frightened and dancing, as the wings dipped and did a little salute to her and to love and to unrequited passion...and probably to hope that she would leave my father and run away. I do remember being scared and exhilarated both, seeing that my mother had this power and this whole other life besides the one I spent with her.
And I remember the wide Florida sky and the heavy, humid air and the loudness drowning out everything but the thought that we never ever know what's going to happen. And knowing, even at seven, that that was probably a good thing.
This is one of the most satisfying novels I've read in a long time. Light years beyond chick lit, wise, and worldly. It's so refreshing to find a novel whose characters feel like real people, not folks you might see on a made-for-TV movie. Annabelle and Grant love each other deeply, but the glue that holds their marriage together might not be enough once the kids are (mostly) grown. The new emptiness in their house begins to fill up with dangerous thoughts and emotions related to an earlier, difficult time in their life together, a time they have agreed never to speak of again. This chapter in their marriage becomes "the stuff that never happened." It did happen, though, and when a new crisis in their lives threatens to break through the silence, Annabelle and Grant have to face the ramifications of keeping their mutual secret.
This book is one of the best novels I have read in years (and I read A LOT!). It starts off very subtley as you wonder why on earth Annabelle and Grant ever got married in the first place and then how the marriage has lasted for 26 years. Through brilliant interweaving of the late 70's when the two main characters first met one another and the mid-2000's as they are empty nesters, we gradually learn and come to understand the dynamics of a long term marriage and to really care about the people, even Grant, who seems rather stuffy. I'm glad we got to learn about all his good points before the end of the story! There were so many wonderful insights into human nature as Annabelle deals with her daughter's questions and explores her own life. Maddie Dawson is an incredibly wise woman to have so exquisitely captured so much truth and wisdom in this novel. I loved this book, and highly recommend it.
This is a fictional novel, but the characters are so real it reads like a true story. The scenes are so emblematic of everyday life that M. Dawson provides the experience of analyzing your best friend's journal. The Stuff That Never Happened, is full of prose that has just the right elixir of drama, humor, and back-story, making it all too easy to slip away from your own life for a few hours and stay up reading long past the time when you should have been asleep.
Just so happens that one of the things that I liked the best about this story is also the thing that I liked the least about this story. Strange, I know. This is the thing: There isn't really a big plot, no real suspense, no climax, and no big surprises. By reading the back of the book you know that Annabell McKay has to choose between two men: her husband and a man from her past. In a nutshell, that is the story. It sounds like typical chicklit, and I'm typically not a big fan of that genre, but this was much better than most of the other books I've read in this category. M. Dawson definitely has a talent for making normal and flawed characters become extraordinarily interesting.
