Minus Me
A Novel
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Diagnosed with cancer, a small-town Maine woman writes a “How To” life manual for her husband in this “smart, funny-quirky” novel about marriage, motherhood, love, and loss (Elinor Lipman, author of On Turpentine Lane).
“A reminder that in the worst of times, we sometimes rediscover the very best of ourselves.” —Jodi Picoult
Annie and her devoted but comically incompetent childhood sweetheart Sam are the owners and operators of Annie's, a gourmet sandwich shop, home to the legendary Paul Bunyan Special Sandwich—their “nutritionally challenged continual source of income and marital harmony and local fame.”
But into their mostly charmed marriage comes the scary medical diagnosis for Annie--and the overwhelming challenge of finding a way to help Sam go on without her. Annie decides to leave Sam step-by-step instructions for a future without her, and considers her own replacement in his heart and their bed. Her best-laid plans grind to a halt with the unexpected appearance of Ursula, Annie’s Manhattan diva of a mother, who brings her own brand of chaos and disruption into their lives.
Minus Me is a poignant and hilarious novel about the bonds of marriage, the burdens of maternal love, and the courage to face mortality, “with an ending readers will cherish (Caroline Leavitt, Pictures of You).”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Medwed (Of Men and Their Mothers) returns with an underwhelming tale of a woman with marital and maternal woes. Annie Stevens-Strauss and her husband, Sam, are childless after four miscarriages and a stillbirth, and her self-involved actress mother, Ursula, can't believe Annie married her high school sweetheart and stayed in her small Maine town to run a sandwich shop. When a scan turns up multiple masses on Annie's lungs, Annie believes she's doomed and puts off a biopsy. She thinks mainly of Sam and his past troubles with depression, and how helpless he'll be without her, so she focuses on writing a how-to manual for life (covering everything from his parents' birthdays to operating instructions for the washing machine) without telling Sam about the scan. Drama ensues over a misunderstanding involving a business loan from Ursula, and plot twists that rely on Annie's almost pathological unwillingness to examine her life until the well-connected Ursula sweeps her off to New York to see a specialist. Medwed's tendency to repeat key facts over and over, such as Sam's depression and Ursula's selfishness, gives the whole affair an unpolished feel. With a passive protagonist at the center, this is a bit of a slog.
