Is Widowhood Forever?

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Read: February 2025

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Three Days in June

by Anne Tyler

Today, I dove into the enchanting world of “Three Days in June” by Anne Tyler, a novel that promises to become an instant classic. It beautifully captures the experience of a socially awkward mother-of-the-bride as she navigates the whirlwind of emotions before and after her daughter’s wedding. After shuffling through the frosty morning air on my walk, wrapping myself in the warmth of Tyler‘s words about three sun-soaked days in June felt like the perfect escape. What a delightful contrast!

Gail Baines is having a bad day. First, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow, her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the groom’s mother. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay or even a suit.

However, the crisis occurs when Debbie shares a secret she has just learned about her husband-to-be with her parents. This will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor and full of the joys and heartbreaks of love, marriage, and family life, “Three Days in June” is a triumph and shows the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer at the height of her powers.

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Read: February 2023

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I Have Some Questions for You

by Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai is a book that, from page one, pulled me into the story and made me believe I was embedded with Bodie Kane as she returned to her boarding school and worked with students to review the murder of her roommate twenty-three years ago. I Have Some Questions for You was more than a page-turner as I was an unnamed participant. I highly recommend this book and, as Ms. Makkai does, buy it at an independent bookstore.

I had not heard of the book until I read a review in The New Yorker by Katty Waldman, who writes, “The new book, a murder mystery set at an élite boarding school, is being marketed as an irresistible whodunnit. But it also joins a growing number of critiques of true crime.” Once I finished the review, I ordered the book and did not put it down until I finished the novel.

Do not “read this book if you”are looking for a whodunnit. It is a critique of true crime and an assessment of the “me too” era. How do we judge the past by the standards of the present?

Every book I have read since Jan died is one I wanted to discuss with her. But I Have Some Questions is one that would have been helpful for both of us to read simultaneously and share our thoughts. Jan’s work with the YWCA of Union County’s Domestic Violence program would have given her a unique perspective. But my lifetime efforts to free me from male blindness would have been a good counterpoint.

Please read this book, share it, and discuss it.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s murder and the conviction of the school’s trainer, Omar Evans, are online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.

But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent ﬂaws. As she falls down the rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t an outsider at Granby as she’d thought, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there?

In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation, timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Read: November 2025

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Thirst Trap: A Novel

by Gráinne O'Hare

Filled with heart and humor, Thirst Trap by Gráinne O’Hare is a lively celebration of friendship, embracing uncertainty, and indulging in “just one more round” before heading home. This sharply funny novel explores the challenges of being in your late 20s as you approach 30, questioning when you will tire of morning hangovers, dead-end entry-level jobs, and late nights at bars. This friend group is about to discover the answer.

Sometimes friends hold you together.
Sometimes they’re why you’re falling apart.

Harley, Róise, and Maggie have been friends for a long time. They met in primary school years ago, and they are still together, spending their nights on the sticky dance floors of Belfast’s grungiest pubs. Each woman is navigating her own challenges—entry-level jobs, messy romantic entanglements, and late nights—but they always find their way back to each other and to the ramshackle house they share. Amidst the familiar chaos, the three are still grieving their fourth housemate, whose room remains untouched, with the weight of their last big fight lingering heavily over them.

The girls’ house has witnessed the highs and lows of their roaring twenties—raucous parties, surprising (and sometimes regrettable) hook-ups, and hellish hangovers. However, as they approach thirty, their home begins to crumble around them, and the cracks in their friendship become harder to ignore. In the midst of the wreckage, they must decide whether their friendship will survive into a new decade or if growing up sometimes means letting go.

Gráinne O’Hare is a writer from Belfast based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She received a Northern Debut Award for Fiction from New Writing North and was awarded funding by the Arts Council for the development and completion of her first novel. She has also been shortlisted for the Francis MacManus Short Story Competition and the Bridport Prize, and came in the top three of the Benedict Kiely Short Story Competition.

She is a media sub-editor for Criticks reviews of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and holds a PhD in eighteenth-century women’s life-writing from Newcastle University.

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Read: December 2022

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Demon Copperhead: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver is a must-read page-turner! Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenage single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

With more knowledge about the devastation of an economy that works for a few and the opioid crisis, I felt as if I was reading about people I knew. Although the book focuses on the impact on boys, it also details the devastation that girls experience.

If Jan had read Demon Copperhead, she would have encouraged me to read it. It reminds us of the work we must do to repair the world.

As a widow, it was a reminder of the long road that we must all take even after we have hit bottom.

WNYC’s All of it hosted an interview with Barbara Kingsolver in which she speaks about Demon Copperhead and her writing.

Demon Copperhead is one of the NYTimes’ top five fiction books of 2022. I have read three of them, The Candy House, The Furrows, and Checkout 19.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damage to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion and, above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Read: August 2022

Three Strong Women

by Marie NDiaye

Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye is a novel that focuses on three women who say no. Winner of the coveted Prix Goncourt, the first by a black woman, Marie NDiaye, creates a luminous narrative triptych as harrowing as beautiful. With lyrical intensity, Marie NDiaye masterfully evokes the relentless denial of dignity, to say nothing of happiness, in these lives caught between Africa and Europe. I highly recommend this novel.

John Fletcher translated the Kindle version.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

This is the story of three women who say no: Norah, a French-born lawyer who finds herself in Senegal, summoned by her estranged, tyrannical father to save another victim of his paternity; Fanta, who leaves a modest but contented life as a teacher in Dakar to follow her white boyfriend back to France, where his delusional depression and sense of failure poison everything; and Khady, an impoverished widow put out by her husband’s family with nothing but the name of a distant cousin (the Fanta above) who lives in France, a place Khady can scarcely conceive of but toward which she must now take desperate flight.

With lyrical intensity, Marie NDiaye masterfully evokes the relentless denial of dignity, to say nothing of happiness, in these lives caught between Africa and Europe. We see with stunning emotional exactitude how ordinary women discover unimagined reserves of strength, even as their humanity is chipped away. Three Strong Women admits to an immigrant experience rarely, if ever, examined in fiction, but even more into the depths of the suffering heart.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month are matched dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Read: January 2022

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Impossible to Forget

by Imogen Clark

Impossible to Forget by Imogen Clark is a poignant novel from the bestselling author of Where the Story Starts, an extraordinary final wish that brings five lives together forever.

Just turned eighteen, Romany is on the cusp of taking her first steps into adulthood when tragedy strikes, and she finds herself suddenly alone without her mother, Angie, the only parent she has ever known. In her final letter, Angie has charged her four closest friends with guiding Romany through her last year of school—but is there an ulterior motive to her unusual dying wish?

When I started reading the book’s initial chapters on Amazon, I found myself in an unexpected page-turner. I had been looking for a relaxing read and instead found a novel that is truly impossible to forget.

The book’s premise that a mother would assign her four closest friends to shared guardianship of her daughter is an unusual answer to a question that Jan and I often debated. Who would we designate to raise our children if something had happened to us? If only we could have had the imagination of Angie and her belief that this strange arrangement would be the answer.

Three of the friends were ones that Angie met at University.

Maggie, an attorney, is designated to focus on the tasks that need order.
Leon is given the culture assignment, although he has denied his talents.
Tiger, a nomad, is in charge of travel.

The fourth guardian, Hope, a former model, is in charge of relationships. But none of the others know her or why Angie would assign her that portfolio.

I very much enjoyed reading this novel. However, despite knowing it is about Angie’s death, I did not expect to find myself weeping uncontrollably in the closing chapters as Romany grapples with the beneficial outcomes of her mum’s plans.

Goodreads provides this overview.

As the guardians reflect on their friendship with Angie, it becomes apparent that this unusual arrangement is as much about them as it is about Romany. Navigating their grief individually and as a group, what will all five of them learn about themselves, their pasts—and the woman who’s brought them all together?

I recommend this book without reservation.

Impossible to Forget is the second time I have gotten a book from Amazon First Reads. Impossible to Forget is not scheduled to be published until February 1, 2022.

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