One True Thing: Love What You Have (Mass Market Paperback)

"You" says Ellen Gulden's father, as he throws her stuff out on the porch after she suggests he "hire a nurse" to take care of her dying mother, "have a Harvard education, but you have no heart."

And so starts her journey back into her family (she quits her job in the big city), back to the mother she never really identified with. So starts her learning process--about human nature...not just about books, or concepts. So starts her learning process about what love is, and what communication between human beings is. It is not just analyzing some dry tract, or being the "Star Pupil". It is far more complicated than that. And this is a complicated, super book.

With her mother's inevitable death, her learning process continues and she changes, finally, into a person "with a heart". I cannot express how moved I was by this book. I was absolutely entranced from page one and read it in three days. I sense that many of the people who review in this section ( the book section) like me, love to analyze things and appreciate beautiful, honest writing. Well, guess what? You get that here, but you also get something more--a look at yourself, and how you must communicate with your family and loved ones, in less "removed" ways. I did, anyway. I am going to try to see things from a more human perspective, because of this book. It is good to judge, and yet sometimes it is better to act from the heart. Oh: and I will TRY to COOK MORE. Can't swear I'll clean any more than I already do, but nobody's perfect. :)

best, Jean

Quindlen's prose is melodious and its lyricism belies her stark observations about how we understand and are understood by those we love.

I was suprised at the adept adaptation of his novel for the screen. The film managed to capture some of the book's most arresting moments while adding important scenes perfectly in keeping with Quindlen's style and intention.

Some readers have complained that the men in the book are weak. That's true. They are weak, selfish, self-centered, lacking in compassion and empathy when those qualities are needed most.

This is the experience of many, many women who trudge on alone, particularly in times of crisis and great emotional pain in their lives and those of their families.

We have all certainly seen ordinary women die alone with great courage or use their strength and compassion to guide others toward a dignified death while the men in their lives slink into a corner, too upset to cope.

Men are generally forgiven this peculiar flaw, requiring even more women to step in and take their place. It is the lack of complaint by women that renders male behavior in this regard utterly invisible.

Ellen's dying mother, an icon of self-sacrifice, has helped to perpetuate this behavior in her husband by labeling it a weakness of character. Ellen herself will have none of his excuses, knowing that love involves the will as well as the heart, and so is powerfully reprimanded by her mother.

And hey -- where are her brothers while she struggles on alone as daddy keeps his extreme distance? Nobody even gives her a week off!

That isn't to say that all guys are wimpy poops like George Gulden or creeps like Ellen's pretty-boy beau or that all women are Mother Theresa (thank god, or the dead would be dead even faster)

But if most man were as compassionate and emotionally generous as say, Pierce Brosnan (yeah, ladies, he's not just hot), One True Thing would ring shrill as a cheap phone. It does not.

I recommend the book for Quindlen's beautiful prose, her confrontation of our worst fears and for her story-telling style. The judicial aspects of the book's (but not the film's) ending were attenuated, distracting and more unlikely than not, but One True Thing is a keeper, a loaner and a book I will long remember.