While I Was Gone by sue miller

Cinda2020

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

A solid story, yet I found myself annoyed once again by a protagonist's selfishness. I have to learn not to be judge-y with these characters or my reading list will start to become very narrow! Once I realize a character is going to be self-absorbed, it starts to spoil the book for me. Still, Miller weaves an interesting tale of a woman's past coming back to haunt her.

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KatrinLouiseo24

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

The title pulled me in. The narrator--a middle-aged woman, veterinarian, mother of two grown daughters, wife of a pastor--explores her own life from the vantage point of an intense personal crisis. Memories--from college days in the 60s--catch up with her, though one suspects she slows the forward pace of her immediate life so that they will certainly overtake her. The struggle thus begins--or continues, heightened. Sue Miller's past-becomes-present plot isn't original, but the writer's rendering of an old scheme caught this reader, also a college student in the 60s, close to home. Bringing any book to an ending can be difficult, and Miller's otherwise beautiful flow of writing halts somewhat in the last third of the novel--hence four stars instead of five. While I Was Gone plunges to surprising, indeed frightening depths before breathless emergence into sight.

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Boundman4th

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

The main character, Jo, is quite unlikable. At first, you sympathize with her but as the book progresses, you realize that she is selfish and oblivious. At the end you will feel sorry for her family, especially her dear husband. Sometimes you take a good life for granted.

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EXKyo_Kusanagi

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

My Original Thoughts (2000):

I loved this book! It grabbed me from the very beginning and I couldn't put it down. I loved the descriptions of the house and neighborhood that Jo lived in and found I could relate to her feelings (to a certain degree) about her children and her husband.

My Current Thoughts:

I don't remember too much about this book and no longer own a copy, so I guess it wasn't one that I thought I'd reread. I think I've only read one other book by Sue Miller (Lost In the Forest), which I also enjoyed very well. I have a copy of her most recent novel (Monogamy) on my bookshelf and plan to read it later this summer.

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florisugent

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I kept asking myself, "What's the point?" What was the point of the novel at all? It was pretty much a few hundred (and a half) pages of a self indulgent woman thinking about her past self indulgent life, her present, and how she can be self indulgent and mess up her future. I totally dislike Jo, past and present.
In the past Jo lives in what we called in California a "commune." It was the 60s, and Jo had run away from her old life, her job, her husband, her mother, brother, etc. for... hmmm... what? She has to live lie after lie to hide who she is, and it's hard to keep her lies straight. She feels she and the other house residents are superior in all ways to Eli, a budding scientist. THEY after all are artists, musicians, writers!
A tragedy occurs, which breaks up the house, causing Jo to return to her former life. On the way back she meets a man a few years later she will marry. An unlikely couple, self indulgent Jo and a minister.
Decades pass, she is now married to this other man, with three young adult daughters, and is a vet. Enter a former housemate from the 60s. Enter trite-ville in the predictable attraction.
Self-indulgent Jo indulges herself in fantasies of this man, rather to the neglect of her husband. She goes so far as to imagine her husband dying, and Eli divorcing his wife. Or, Eli's wife dying and she would divorce her husband. Or, maybe both of the spouses could die "painlessly, of course," so she and Eli could be together. Ick. Fantasies are one thing, but imagining the death of your husband in order to free yourself?
Could it be the empty nest? We meet the daughters, none of which seem to get along, or even like their mother much.
Very implausible ending. If someone admitted to me he had committed murder (of a friend no less, one I found dead, still warm and bleeding) I would not rest until I was believed! So, Eli convinces the police she's lying because he spurned her advances. She accepts that, and is relieved she can now "let it go." Eli is a murderer! She should spend all her efforts on pushing the truth! Do anything possible to ruin him, short of libel or slander of course, staying within the law! I don't believe the police would brush her off so easily. She didn't show herself too much of a friend to the murdered woman, did she? For all the years those few months in the commune were supposed to have formed her future.
In the end she is still self indulgent, never really "getting" the point she didn't need to have had a physical affair with Eli to cheat on her husband. She betrayed him. She lied about where she'd be, and why she might be staying the night with a "friend." She phoned Eli and arranged to meet him. She picked the place, a hotel restaurant.
Not really much point to so much of the details about the old days, and her daughter's lives. Boring.

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aLotQuestion_

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Reading this book was an amazing experience.
WHILE I WAS GONE is an introspective and mysterious book that was completely engrossing and mesmerizing.
This book made me question a lot of things about life, about pain and memories, about the past, present and the future. 'The different versions of ourselves that life keeps offering' is hard to accept, and the fact, the hard truth that the old version is gone, is more so. Are our thoughts who we really are? Having thoughts about a situation that is wrong, about a wrong act you want to commit but didn't in the end, is it wrong? Is it a crime, a wrong act, to have this thoughts in the beginning?
I loved how this book questioned all of these aspects about life and our thoughts. The theme of forgiveness resonated throughout the book, with Jo,Daniel and Eli. The fact that Jo could't believe that she could ever be a person who could betray someone else, is such a human emotion, that it really astounded me with how genuine it was.
We are always putting the parts of ourselves that are bad in the shadows, our subconscious shadow self. We know what this self wants, but we choose to pretend to be ignorant of it, or at least not to agree with it. So when this self truly emerges from the shadows and shows its true colours, we cannot believe that this self is actually a part of ourselves.
That is what Jo Becker experiences in this story. She realises truths about herself and the past, about what forgiveness truly is, and she understands that no matter what point in life we were, there would always be parts of ourselves that we would keep secret and hide from others.
And upto some extent, this wasn't wrong. But we should also understand that we have an impact on others' lives as well.
Truly, this book is amazing. There were so many lessons I got from this book...I really loved it.

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PeachesPoaches

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

While I didn't love the main character in this novel, author Sue Miller is a master of scene and narrative detail (and as she notes in an interview printed in the back of the book, she found it hard to like Jo Becker too).

Jo Becker is having some sort of existential late-life crisis in "While I Was Gone" (1999). Despite having a successful career as a veterinarian, three daughters and a solid, long-term marriage to a preacher, she constantly questions her conventional life. This complex internal conflict is exacerbated when a man she lived with in a hippie-style group house in 1968 moves to town.

Some readers have described Becker as self-absorbed and selfish, but I tend to think she's just unsatisfied sometimes, even though it's not clear whether she has a good reason for being so. That makes her tough to sympathize with, but I find it also makes her real and deep. Also, the first-person narrative only clues in the reader to Becker's feelings and thought process.

I didn't initially enjoy the first-person narrative but I think the perspective strengthens the story, which is best in its seamless complexity of emotion. The first couple of chapters of the novel seem to move slowly because they are filled Becker's thoughts instead of narrative events, but the story picks up afterward.

Miller explores themes of marriage, child-parent relationships and memory, and the details are beautifully written. I think this novel is meant to be more thought-provoking and introspective rather than full of action. Miller takes her time to describe emotions many people could likely relate to or have felt, but the characters aren't always relatable.

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