While I Was Gone is not a religious book, but it's one of the most Christian books I've read. We all have something in our past. Something we keep secret. We'll never tell anyone. We did something awful, or something awful happened to us. We can't tell, because it doesn't match our carefully crafted image. Worse, they’d never understand. They wouldn't accept us.
Sue Miller taps into this. She doesn't connect the dots, but I can't help but see Jesus. We can tell God. Because of the cross, God will accept us. God will forgive us. God will free us. How good does that feel?
Notes:

(1) “It was only as I began to startle and disappoint others that I was aware of myself at all—that I came to understand, slowly, that I wasn’t who I had pretended to be. (50)

(2). Made my throat cotton...” (70)

(3) “Loss brings pain. Yes. But pain triggers a memory. And memory is a kind of new birth, within each of us.“ (110)

(4) Miller really makes you work for the pay off

(5) Personal note: when we do something awful, unspeakable, we want someone to understand. In our hearts, we know they won’t. MIller brings this out (211)

(6) “It seems we need someone to know us as we are—with all that we have done— and forgive us. We need to chill. We need to be holding someone site: no this about me, and yet love me, please.” (261). Personal note: can I call it, or what?

A compelling story about a very conflicted woman on the precipice of a classic mid-life crisis. Told in the first person the narrative is very easy to follow and also done well enough that you find yourself in her world very easily even as she flashes back and forth through her memories. Jo is a study of impulsiveness and unintended secrecy. She has everything she could want in life and she *knows* it, but....the classic BUT.

I wont spoil it, but there is an interesting twist which, for once, I didn't see coming 10 chapters away.

Mostly I just enjoyed spending the time with her in her New England farm house, meandering through the seasons, attending to her veterinary practice and her life unfolds.

I will definitely put Sue Miller on my list of authors to re-visit.

This novel is a psychological examination of the main character who is narrated in a very reflective first person style. This psychological unveiling is why I loved this book!

Sue Miller really understands people. Her insights into human behavior is startling at times in its accuracy.

With loaded word choices her sentences lay heavy with meaning. I would be interested in anything she has written or will write.

Miller does remind me some of Berg. A new beloved author!

"I was remembering the way it feels at just that moment when you begin to turn, when you're poised exactly between the things in life you want to do and those you need to do, and it seems for a few blessed seconds that they are all going to be the same." (p.20)

"But more...just all that energy, all that work and closeness. Where did it go?
It went into making them wonderful. Making them who they are." (p.12)

"Who reminds you that what seems to be-- even about yourself -- may not be. (p.266)