One True Thing: A Novel
by Anna Quindlen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Anna QuindlenEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-08-08
ISBN: 0812976185
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780812976182
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of One True Thing: A Novel
Book Review: Excellent, If a Bit Too Focused on Housework
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great book, and the protagonist Ellen's realizations about her mother's unhealed wounds being channeled into making a physical cocoon of a family with cooking/housework/Christmas decorations, letting her daughter go into emulating her father without protecting her or wanting more for her, were worth the entire book.
I wish she would have looked at this more, though. In the end, Ellen concludes her father used the mother for love (which was more a type of "doting" than really knowing each other) and the daughter for intellectual/work companionship. I think this is a kind of child abuse for a daughter to be used in this way. When Ellen doesn't speak to her father for 8 years, this is sort-of explained as being about his possibly have given the overdose of morphine? I think more realistically Ellen might have been avoiding him because she was recognizing buried rage and frustration about the way he treated her, and possibly her mother as well.
I also liked how at the end of the book Ellen finds a man who is capable of nurturing, and she keeps her own agency in the world with her career/earning money in a profession far afield from her father's. This also could have received more focus.
I thought Ellen was way too forgiving of both her parents, however. I suspect there is more emotional content there: (a) rage and frustration at being used by her father and made in his image rather than being her own person, (b) rage and frustration at her mother not looking at her own wounds and becoming more of a self-sufficient, equal partner for the father so Ellen wouldn't have to, (c) rage at the father for not being there for the mother at her death, (d) rage at both parents at not being more allies for Ellen in her choice of boyfriends and her education/career establishment (no wonder Ellen chose the father's career; she had to find a way to support herself, but because the parents didn't talk about this, it became a subconscious survival mechanism to emulate him, I suspect.).
It was her parents' job to "see" Ellen, and then, as she matured, she could "see" them. They never "saw" her in the first place, and this is why she would be incapable of "seeing" them. When she says at the end she wishes she had let her mother express herself more, I wanted to say "it was not your job to parent your mother when she did not parent you." You wouldn't be able to do it anyway; the mother has to come to terms with that loss on her own. If the relationship had been healthier in the first place, I can imagine that Ellen could then have been there as more of an equal to her mother when she was dying (as the father could have been as well).
The book focuses a lot on cooking, cleaning, crafts, and Christmas decorations. I suspect these are not all to be taken literally and are really meant as a metaphor for nurturing? I think these are a bit false & materialistic substitutes for members of a family really knowing each other and helping each other.
Even if the subject is cooking, cleaning, and furnishing a home, these are much more meaningful when the whole family, including the father and the sons, participates in them.
Summary of One True Thing: A Novel
A mother. A daughter. A shattering choice.From Anna Quindlen, bestselling author of Black and Blue, comes a novel of life, love and everyday acts of mercy.
"A triumph."
--San Francisco Chronicle
From the Paperback edition.
One True Thing is a film starring Meryl Streep as the cancer-stricken homemaker mother, Renee Zellweger as the daughter who quits her top-dog job to care for her, and William Hurt as the chilly professor who lets the women in the family do the heavy emotional lifting dying requires. But the real star of the project remains former New York Times everyday-life columnist Anna Quindlen, who quit her top-dog job to write novels (and who took time off from college to nurse her own dying mother).
Quindlen hit a nerve with One True Thing, which captures an experience seldom dealt with in popular culture. (One exception: the sensitive 1996 film with Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio of the play Marvin's Room.) Though the heroine of One True Thing, Ellen Gulden, is a golden girl with two brothers who'll lose her career the instant she steps off the fast track, society concurs with her dad, who says, "It seems to me another woman is what's wanted here."
The book is a mother-daughter tale that should please fans of, say, The Joy Luck Club. It's not flashy, but it has a deep feel for the way children often discover, just before it's too late, who their parents really are. "Our parents are never people to us," Ellen writes, "they're always character traits.... There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat." The mercy-killing subplot isn't gripping, but the palpable sense of deepening family intimacy certainly is. --Tim Appelo
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