While I Was Gone (Oprah's Book Club)
by Sue Miller

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Book Reviews of While I Was Gone (Oprah's Book Club)

Book Review: A very introspective book
Summary: 5 Stars

With this reminiscing she recalls her former self and tries to understand the people and events in her past. Some were very disturbing. Most are guilded with the innocence of youth.

The author sets the stage with the main character Jo, having an "epiphany" of sorts, a freeze frame that another turning point in her life is being reached. She builds for the reader the story of Jo's life with the day to day details. When you are reading this book, you are Jo, if only for a moment.

In this contented recently empty nest life, Jo and her husband a minister she does not share a faith with, go about their normal lives with no sense of "what's next". Only recently has the last of their 3 daughters moved out and they are reinventing their schedule and getting to know one another as a couple again.

Due to a connection provided by her daughter Sadie, Jo runs into a former friend of her counter-culture life in her early 20s. Back when they shared a communal house one of their housemates was murdered. The author builds through Jo's recollecting how she remembers that life and it's initial innocence. It also shows Jo's confused sense of self at that time.

Jo's relationship to her past is soon caught up in her association with this man. This sets up events that nearly destroy her marriage. This relationship provides her an opportunity to explore and revisit the person she once was. She examines her motivation and questions it as well. It is a very good portrait of some of the questions one asks oneselves when faced with hard issues. Most of us would like to think we know the answers. Most of us find out, we have no clue.

Without giving away the twist of the story, I have to say, the author had my heart pounding when I realized what a dialogue was unfolding into. It was masterfully handled and ironically later on was paralleled with one conversation Jo had with her mother.

This book gets into your head and you understand many of Jo's feelings observations and day to day life. You get to understand how she thinks. She is a closed person and you see this in her thoughts, which are rarely revealed to the characters around her. Her relationship to her coworkers, husband and daughters are well defined. As a mother you can see the dynamic that unfolds, when there is family competition between childen. The author handles this well.

I found this book facinating and highly recommend it.

The only critique I would make is to the author. While Jo and her husband are highly educated people, I'm not sure some of the "vocabulary" is realistic for the characters. I felt sometimes the author dipped into her own background with linguistics versus the characters. This happened only a few times, but it seemed out of character at the time.

Summary of While I Was Gone (Oprah's Book Club)

Now this unhappy era returns in the person of Eli Mayhew, who had been the odd man out in Jo's boho household. His appearance is both tantalizing and upsetting: "Inside, I slowed down. I felt numbed. I had two last patients, and then I told Beattie to go home, that I'd close up.... I refiled the last charts, sprayed and wiped the examining table. I reviewed my list of routine surgeries for Wednesday. All the while I was thinking of Eli Mayhew, and of Dana and Larry and Duncan and me, and our lives in the house. Of the horrible way it had all ended." Sue Miller's fine novel is a penetrating--and sensuous--portrait of a woman besieged by her conscience. While I Was Gone also demonstrates that in the face of distance and betrayal, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing indeed. --Winnie Wheaton

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