The Slippery Year - A Meditation on Happily Ever After

Zusatztext 77577082 Informationen zum Autor MELANIE GIDEON was born and raised in Rhode Island. She now lives in the Bay Area with her husband and son. Klappentext Melanie Gideon's hilarious memoir is a disarmingly honest take on marriage and motherhood by a woman who realized she was sleepwalking through life and decided she needed to do something about it. "The Slippery Year "chronicles her struggle to rediscover meaning and pleasure in life while navigating the comical ups and downs of cohabiting with a husband! a child! and a dog: mattress wars with her snoring mate! the psychological minefield of the school carpool line! and sending her son to sleep-away camp for the first time. Gideon manages to be laugh-out-loud funny while also reflecting beautifully and movingly on her quest to appreciate what she has. September   Whenever my husband casually says, “Hey, hon, come take a look at this Web site,” I know it’s going to cost me. All of our largest purchases have been preceded by my being summoned to his computer in this manner. So when he says this a few weeks before his birthday, I knew it’s really going to cost me, and I don’t mean just financially.   “Check this out,” he says, pointing. “Isn’t it cool?”   I glance at the Ford E-350 on his screen. It looks like the sort of vehicle that shuttles retirees to the local mall. “Kind of,” I reply.   He frowns and says, “It’s not just any old van. It’s a camper. It would be perfect for us. You said you wanted to see the West.”   I do want to see the West, in theory anyway. In fact, seeing the West was one of the reasons we moved with our nine-year-old son, Ben, to California. But travel takes so much planning, and as I’ve gotten older I’m increasingly less willing to tolerate discomfort: the crowds, the traffic, everybody trying to reach the same place at the same time.   His fingers pound at the keyboard. “It’s got captain’s seats.”   “What’s a captain’s seat?”   “That means it’s very, very comfortable.”   “Nice,” I say, getting back to my book.   Ten minutes later, he says, “I’m going to get one for us.”   “Us?” I say.   “Yes, us—you know, you and me?”   The subtext being: Aren’t you lucky you married a man who wants to buy a family van as his midlife-crisis vehicle instead of a Porsche Carrera GT?   The good news is he finds a used van. The bad news is it’s in South Dakota. So he pays somebody to fly to South Dakota, pick up the van and drive it back. “It’s an amazing deal,” he says. “It only has fifteen thousand miles on it, and the woman is a motivated seller.” Once the van is on its way, my husband tells me the truth. The woman was not the original owner; her son was, or had been. He bought the van to go kayaking in the most untouched places. Then one day he went out in his boat and never returned. This van delivered him to his death. And now his heartbroken mother had sold it to us.   “You have to give it back,” I tell him. “He died in it.”   “He didn’t die in it. He died in his kayak.”   “Well, he might as well have died in the van,” I say. “He was in the van right before he died.”   My husband sighs.   I want him to be happy, us to be happy. It seems every day we hear that another couple has decided to call it quits. More often than not in our circle, the wife leaves the husband. When talking divorce with these women—mothers, like me, of schoolage children—we speak in a shorthand that ricochets around in my head like the rhymes of Dr. Seuss.   They say: Feeling dead. Dead in bed. Too much snore. There’s got to be more.   I say: Turn his head. His head in bed. You’ll have no more. No more snore.   Now, there are plenty of good reasons to end a marriage, but each time I hear of another impending divorce I can’t help but reevaluate my own marriage. Do I want more? Does he? And how do I know if wh...

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Melanie Gideon
• Verlag: Anchor Books USA
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 10.08.2010
• EAN: 9780307454867
• ISBN: 978-0-307-45486-7
• Seiten: 224
• Abmessung: 130 mm x 202 mm x 15 mm
• Serie: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Thema: Belletristik > Erzählende Literatur > Briefe, Tagebücher