While I Was Gone [Hardcover]

Sue Miller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 19, 1999

A decade ago she put a face on every mother's worst nightmare with her phenomenal best-seller The Good Mother. Now, Sue Miller delivers a spellbinding novel of love and betrayal that explores what it means to be a good wife.

In the summer of 1968, Jo Becker ran out on the marriage and the life her parents wanted for her, and escaped--for one beautiful, idyllic year--into a life that was bohemian and romantic, living under an assumed name in a rambling group house in Cambridge. It was a time of limitless possibility, but it ended in a single instant when Jo returned home one night to find her best friend lying dead in a pool of blood on the living room floor.  

Now Jo has everything she's ever wanted: a veterinary practice she loves, a devoted husband, three grown daughters, a beautiful Massachusetts farmhouse. And if occasionally she feels a stranger to herself and wonders what happened to the freedom she once felt, or how she came to be the wife, mother, and doctor her neighbors know and trust--if at times she feels as if her whole life is vanishing behind her as she's living it--she need only look at her daughters or her husband, Daniel, to recall the satisfactions of family and community and marriage.

But when an old housemate settles in her small town, the fabric of Jo's life begins to unravel: seduced again by the enticing possibility of another self and another life, she begins a dangerous flirtation that returns her to the darkest moment of her past and imperils all she loves.

While I Was Gone is an exquisitely suspenseful novel about how quickly and casually a marriage can be destroyed, how a good wife can find herself placing all she holds dear at risk. In expert strokes, Sue Miller captures the precariousness of even the strongest ties, the ease with which we abandon each other, and our need to be forgiven. An extraordinary book, her best, from a beloved American writer.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In her still startling debut, The Good Mother, Sue Miller explored the premium we put on passion--and the terrible burden it places on a mother and child. Her fourth novel, While I Was Gone, is another study in familial crime and punishment. But this time, her wife and good mother is accessory to more than emotional malfeasance. Jo Becker has everything a woman could desire: a loving spouse, contented children, and a nice dog or two. When her New England veterinary practice takes on a new client, however, her past comes back to haunt her. Long ago, it seems, Jo had escaped her family and identity for a commune in Cambridge. Her Aquarian illusions came to an abrupt, bloody end when one of her housemates was brutally murdered.

Now this unhappy era returns in the person of Eli Mayhew, who had been the odd man out in Jo's boho household. His appearance is both tantalizing and upsetting: "Inside, I slowed down. I felt numbed. I had two last patients, and then I told Beattie to go home, that I'd close up.... I refiled the last charts, sprayed and wiped the examining table. I reviewed my list of routine surgeries for Wednesday. All the while I was thinking of Eli Mayhew, and of Dana and Larry and Duncan and me, and our lives in the house. Of the horrible way it had all ended." Sue Miller's fine novel is a penetrating--and sensuous--portrait of a woman besieged by her conscience. While I Was Gone also demonstrates that in the face of distance and betrayal, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing indeed. --Winnie Wheaton

From Publishers Weekly

The shadowy and inexorable nemesis of past secrets to a reclaimed life, and the inability even of those who are intimates to really know one another, are poignant themes in Miller's resonant fifth novel. Narrator Jo Becker, now a veterinarian married to a minister in a small Massachusetts town, was once a runaway bride who assumed a false name and lived with other dissaffected '60s bohemians in a group house in Cambridge. Her special friend in the house was sweet-spirited and generous Dana Jablonski, whose shocking?and unsolved?murder broke up the group and left Jo with unresolved questions about her own identity. She manages to ignore the memories of that time until, almost three decades later, one of the former housemates, Eli Mayhew, moves to her town. Eli, now a distinguished research scientist, provides a revelation that acts as the catalyst provoking Jo to face her guilt about her past behavior?and to act impulsively once again. Her moral conundrum occasions a heartrending change in her heretofore strong marriage and undermines her relationship with her three grown daughters. As usual, Miller (The Good Mother; Family Pictures) renders the details of quotidian domesticity with bedrock veracity and a sensitivity to minute calibrations of family dynamics, especially the nuances of sibling rivalry. But while the pacing, tone and measured exposition are handled with masterly skill, the way in which Jo's decision to make amends for her past rebounds on her present life seems staged and convoluted, since her husband and children seem to think that retribution for a murder should take second place to their own emotional needs. That cavil aside, Miller's narrative is a beautifully textured picture of the psychological tug of war between finding integrity as an individual and satisfying the demands of spouse, children and community. 150,000 first printing; Random House audio; BOMC selection; author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (January 19, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375401121
• ISBN-13: 978-0375401121
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #722,114 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Forgiveness and redemption overcome horrific past event!, March 21, 2000

By 

Kay Mitchell - See all my reviews

This review is from: While I Was Gone (Hardcover)

Once again, Sue Miller has written a thoughtful and powerful story, this time about Jo Becker, a woman of quiet integrity and trustworthy love. Her marriage to a kind and gentle minister, their three precocious and talented daughters, and her much loved profession as a veterinarian place her in positions of high regard and respect in her community and great affection and love with her family. But Jo has a past life that she cannot forget, partly because of the role she played at a time when she was searching for her own identity, and largely because of a tragic and horrific event that brought that other life to a screeching halt. When a friend from that past surfaces in her small Massachusetts town, the memories come rushing back with a vividness akin to the actual time, and she relives the tragedy once again. She is drawn to this old housemate in a strange and frightening way, a sexual fantasy that not only attracts but also repels her. This is a story about trust and betrayal . It takes us to the edge of that certainty of how well we can know a person, even if we have lived with them for years. It also reminds us of how we can return from the edge of heartbreak and despair through faith and the abiding affection that sometimes exists between people who truly love each other. Miller's characters are real and if they suffer, the reader suffers with them, hoping for forgiveness and redemption.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sue Miller Never Disappoints, January 9, 2000

By 

C. Lacher "armchaircritic" (Washington State) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: While I Was Gone (Hardcover)

I got this book only because Sue Miller is the author. I had absolutely no idea what it was about, didn't even read the book flaps. I just plunged in expecting Miller's talent would shine through. I was NOT disppointed. She has such a way with being able to create an unusual but entirely believable situation and present it entirely from a woman's point of view. And not a sappy woman either. But strong and individualistic. Miller never breaks away to give the husband's or the daughter's viewpoint. It stays focused right on the main character, as painful as that may be. I could SEE this woman, and her home and her life and I could FEEL and identify with her every breath and emotion. An unsettling but fascinating read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We all have secrets, March 2, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: While I Was Gone (Paperback)

We all have secrets from the past. If you don't believe that, perhaps you shouldn't read this book! But if you do accept that truth, you know that as we reach "a certain age" we have to reconcile our past and our present lives. That is the subject of this book. My life is certainly very different from Jo's, but I can really identify with her. Sue Miller is a talented writer, and While I Was Gone is a gripping novel. I especially enjoyed the interview with the author and the questions for reading groups in the Ballantine Reader's Circle edition.