Wouldn't read again

3.5 stars

Thirty years ago, bored by the prospect of her future in a safe marriage, Jo ran away and spent a few months in a communal house in Boston, enjoying the hippy lifestyle while keeping herself distanced from it. That all fell apart when she came home one night to find Dana, the commune's earthmother figure, brutally murdered by, it seems, an intruder intent on raiding the occupants' housekeeping money.

Now Jo is a successful vet in a small Massachusetts town, happily married to her second husband, Daniel, a preacher. Their three daughters have largely flown the nest. But then the tranquility is disturbed when the owner of a dog that needs to be put down proves to be one of her old housemates, now a distinguished neurochemist. Meeting him again stirs up her memories of those long-ago days of freedom, of irresponsibility. Does she really wish to revisit those memories? And, if she does, will it mean the sacrifice of her marriage to Daniel?

I'm not a hundred percent certain why I bought this book; if I'd noticed the dread words "Oprah's Book Club" on the front or the fact that it has one of those infuriating, pretentious Readers' Guides at the back I probably wouldn't have. I pulled it from the shelf because I've been stuck in bed for most of the past few days with some horrible bug, a situation that has the sole advantage of inspiring me to read a few books that I've been ignoring. And I was immediately hooked by it.

Although there's a violent death early on and in a way a murder mystery to be solved, that's not really what Miller's story is about. Instead, it seems to me, she's concerned with how we can reinvent ourselves only so often and only so much before the consequences start redounding upon us. In a very quiet, measured, yet utterly engrossing way she leads us through the labyrinth that Josie has made of her life, exposing also the instability that lies beneath the surface of her outwardly placid marriage to Daniel. Josie has to face the fact that she hasn't been living up to her own ideals; but then Daniel doesn't quite match the ideal image she's created for him either, behaving like an absolute prig at a time when he, more than anyone, should understand that what she needs from him is comfort and support. And, where earlier she showed herself so good at running away from her life, it's now, when she feels least like running away, that she has to confront estrangement.

In short, While I Was Gone is as much of a white-knuckle read as any thriller I can recall, and it carries an emotional heft that I'm sure will remain with me a long while, as will the questions it raises.

I was a little disappointed in this book. There was a decided lack of closure in this ending. and in places it was frustratingly like a teen scream horror movie - you just want to snap out at the protagonist. Use common sense. Don't go into that dark, scary basement! As always, Sue Miller's characters are full and well rounded, and her descriptive passages are lovely. This book was well worth reading, but I will not keep it to read again. I will continue to have Sue Miller on my list of authors to read.

I was painfully disappointed in this book. I find the whole premise unrealistic. How does one experience such horror and go about their life, with no apparent PTDS. She now has kids in college, but has no "warnings" for them about her own experiences as a young adult? And then you just go ahead living in the time town this this murderer? Nah, I don't think so. It skirts around this huge psychological issues, but does it with a distance and coldness, that just doesn't work.

I think that most of us feel separate from the person we once were, as though our earlier life belongs to someone we used to know; a person we have now lost touch with. This is certainly true for Jo Becker, whose restlessness and unhappiness in her first marriage led her to escape to another city where she lived under an assumed name in a house shared with several roommates. Years later, when Jo's daughters have all left home to live their own lives, Jo is adjusting to her empty nest with her minister husband when one of those roommates from her past reenters her life.

Sue Miller is an excellent writer, and this could have been (in fact I expected it to be) just another "women's story" about a middle-aged woman who has an affair and the typical consequences. But since it had the Oprah's Book Club label I trusted that it would be worth reading, and it was.

A few favorite passages:

"You might have thought I was slumming, taking such a job, and of course, in a way, that would be fair. I was a college graduate, from a good school. I'd taken courses after college to prepare myself to teach high school. I'd married my promising husband. He certainly thought I was slumming. But he saw my job as a kind of perverse joke, too, and took a malicious pride in it. That was fine with me. Whatever he thought. Whatever anyone thought. The point for me was that for once I didn't have any idea what it would lead to. Some of the point anyway. The job was also a claim on my time from five or so in the afternoon until well after midnight every day, time I might have spent cooking a nice meal, grading papers, making curtains, talking to my husband. All the things I'd prepared myself to to and promised others I would do."

"It wasn't that I had been conscious of falsifying myself when I was living my other life. I'm sure I hadn't. I think, in fact, that I was barely conscious of having a self in that world. My mother tells me that I was a willful little girl, but I don't remember that. What I remember is later, when I wasn't willful anymore: the inner calm of knowing I was satisfying expectations, I was pleasing. The self isn't important in such a feeling. It was only as I began to startle and disappoint other that I was aware of myself at all - that I came to understand, slowly, that I wasn't who I had pretended to be. And now, when I was pretending to be someone completely other than myself, I felt, for the first time, at home in my skin."

"Now it had come back to me, but with some of that sense of remove I felt looking at the group photo of us on the porch steps, seeing myself there in my long hippie hair and my bell-bottom jeans. Remove, and a kind of shame for having fogotten so much I'd sworn always to remember. It seemed to me then that if there was an admonition, it was simply this: we have no right to let go of so much that shaped us; we shouldn't be allowed to forget."

In any given day, there are an infinite number of things I would like to get away from -- phone calls, traffic, laundry, work. Who hasn't wanted to get away from their lives or to experience what it's like to be someone else? But the fact that I, like so many others, stay grounded and don't indulge the urge to run made it hard for me to like Jo, the main character.

Jo's a runner. Sue Miller gives a lot of examples of things she runs away from. She runs away from home when she was eight or nine years old; she leaves her first husband and her family; she leaves her grimacing husband holding the twins -- two wailing babies crying out to her -- for work, where she forgets about them; and during the day she runs away from the reality of the present to the wonders of her fantasies, especially once Eli, a roommate from her days of being Licia, comes back into her life.

Jo's also a very hard character to know. One of her daughters calls her elusive, and it's true. She's led a double life, she has secrets from her daughters and mother, she keeps things from her husband (and when she does share with him, it seems to be all the wrong things -- the things that will hurt him), and even though Miller tells the story from Jo's perspective, from the first person, as a reader you don't really know who she is either. Because Jo doesn't know who she is.

My favorite scene was Daniel's sermon -- it was so beautifully written and delivered. For me, he was an easier character to like because he seems genuinely happy with his life and sure of who he is.

But despite my issues with the main character, the book was really, really good.

I really liked Sue Miller's writing style and found that this kept me going through a book where not really very much happens. As I've mentioned before, I'm very poor at seeing what's coming when there's a twist in a book and I was certainly surprised with this one but my colleague who I suggested the book to after I'd finished it saw it coming on about page 20! It's hard to know what to say about this book really - a convincing portrayal of a long married couple and their reactions when an event from the past comes back to haunt them. However, not too dramatic and not hugely eventful...

Miller is one of those authors who can't resist taking adjectives and turning them into verbs. The results are horrific. My advice to you is to turn away now, read no further.

"I tried my hardest never to still."
"The animals gentled and stilled."
"Her laugh shrilled."
"The flesh of her neck was silvered with sweat."

As with all books that have "reading group discussion guides" at the back, I find it hard to say anything about this book. For all of the long, prodding questions the discussion guide wants us to think about, I couldn't rouse myself to think about any of them for more than a split second. "Should all secrets be told?" I don't know. No? "Are thoughts in and of themselves, dangerous? Immoral?" If I had read more philosophy I might be able to answer these questions. "Discuss the theme of forgiveness in the novel." See, this is why I am not keen on Oprah's Book Club or "reading group discussion guides." Leave me alone! Why should this slight creampuff of a novel engender so many discussions?

I will say that a note in the book that rang false was the protagonist's marriage to a minister. (The protagonist had a brief starter marriage, fled her husband without telling anyone where she was going, lived in a communal house under a fake name, her best friend in the house was murdered, she divorced the husband, became a veterinarian, married the minister and had three daughters.) Jo is not "a person of faith." Now, I have spent a lot of time in church. In church and in churches. Church and I know each other well. It is not plausible that Daniel would have married this completely secular woman. Perhaps such a thing could happen in a Protestant denomination today, but they got married in the 1970s, when churches were more conservative overall and there were certain expectations of the ministerial spouse. Jo and Daniel do explain to the church's search committee that she will not be a typical minister's wife....but. There is no way that Daniel will have devoted his whole life to the ministry and then bind himself - for life - to a spouse who doesn't buy into any of it.

3.5 stars
"For me, the sorrow was laced with guilt. I was the betrayer, after all, and it was with a pained and startled self-recognition that I felt this as something familiar about myself. I had thought of it as new, as news, really. Something startling, something fresh I was learning about myself. It had even titllated me: I could b, I might be, a person who could betray someone"

The story is ok. But the majority of the middle drags on and is not surprising in the end. But if you like books and authors who can write succinctly your complex thoughts and emotions, then you will love this book. I happen to like both a great story along with artful literary description s of complex human thoughts, motives and emotions. She definitely delivered in the latter.

I first read this book 10+ years ago when it was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club pick. I liked it well enough then to hang on to my copy; I don't keep every book, because I just don't have the space, so I'm very choosy about what I do keep. I knew I'd want to reread this one some day, and I'm glad that I did.

Veterinarian Jo Becker lives a comfortable existance in a small New England town, married with three grown daughters who are out of the house. Comfortable, that is, until someone from her past reenters her life and causes her to reflect on a summer in her 20's (some 25 years ago) when she lived in a communal house with six other people. That summer of 1968 ended with the murder of one of the housemates. Jo's recollection of this time is my favorite part of the book; it only takes up about 1/3 of the pages, and I would've really liked to have read more about that than her present life, which tended to drag on and be a bit dry at times. But the parts about her prior life made the dry parts worth pushing through, and worthy of a 5-star rating.

My only complaints are the previously mentioned dryness at times, and the fact that I couldn't relate to the main character. As much as I loved the story itself, I really didn't like Jo very much. She made selfish decisions that hurt other people, and I found myself judging her for it. Just like in real life, though, right? I appreciated that the characters were realistic and well-developed, even if I didn't like some of them.

Small warning to dog lovers -- there is some sadness in the beginning of the book when Jo has to euthanize an older dog :( I hate reading about such things, but I pushed through it.

This was a well-written book with a good story and twist, but it was hard for me to relate to it. I think it’s targeted towards an older audience who can relate to the struggles of marriage, affairs, past selves. Still, the writing style and word choice kept me engaged through it all.