The Life You Longed For
A Novel
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
When every mother's worst nightmare becomes Grace's reality, she must examine her entire life -- from the wrong choices to the right mistakes.
Grace's son Jack is a miracle. At three years old, he's fighting a mysterious, deadly disease that his doctors predicted would kill him as a baby. Even though it was determined to be mitochondrial disease, the little-known illness remains a mystery to medicine. Grace has sat by his bedside every minute he has been in the hospital, questioned every diagnosis, every medicine -- even poring over medical journals and books at home late into the night. To the world, Grace's fierce dedication is the sole reason for her son's survival. But someone suspects that perhaps Jack's disease is not what it seems.
When an allegation of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is leveled against Grace, she begins to live in constant suspicion of everyone -- from the doctors and nurses surrounding her son in the hospital to her own husband. Who could possibly think that she has been purposely making her son ill to gain attention for herself?
Although her husband believes their life is exactly as it seems to the outside world, Grace knows differently. She is harboring a secret -- the adulterous affair she's having with her first love. But perhaps her biggest betrayal of all is her shameful uncertainty about whether she's chosen the right path, the right husband, the right life.
In this compelling and heartbreaking novel, critically acclaimed author Maribeth Fischer addresses how the choices we made yesterday can affect everything that lies before us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Fischer's wrenching second novel, Grace Connolly's youngest son, three-year-old Jack, is terminally ill following a baffling, heartbreaking diagnosis of mitochondrial disease. At times, Grace, a full-time mother of three with a background in epidemiology, feels that everyone else around her (Jack's medical specialists; husband Stephen) has given up hope. Desperate to reclaim her "normal" life, Grace reignites a romance with her first love. Her predictable affair with the almost painfully idealized Noah McIntyre becomes one factor in accusations that Grace has fabricated Jack's disease to gain attention allegations that result in his removal from her custody just when he is most ill. Fischer (The Language of Goodbye) has an uphill battle to gain readers' sympathy for an adulterous mother, and for the most part she succeeds. The weight of the disease, science and history trivia that peppers Fischer's prose seems ponderous at first, but matches the heaviness of Grace's grief. While allegations of Munchausen by Proxy (a real disorder where mothers sicken children to get attention) form the sensationalist backbone of the novel and Fischer's characterizations tend toward the schematic, agonizing truths about losing a child while still longing for "a life beyond the one you were living" come through clearly. The ending's reliance on 9/11, however, feels forced at best.