A Year and Six Seconds
A Love Story
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A real-life romantic comedy about getting dumped and getting over it
Isabel Gillies, the New York Times bestselling author of Happens Every Day, has written another irresistibly moving and funny memoir: A Year and Six Seconds: A Love Story. When our story opens, it's a dark and slushy winter in New York City, where Isabel is arriving by airplane from Ohio, two toddlers in tow, to move in with her parents; her husband has left her for another woman. In subsequent scene after hilarious scene, Isabel shares her valiant, misguided, and bumbling attempts to understand her own part in the disintegration of her marriage and to feel strong and loveable. And, one by one, she begins to cross items off a staggering single mom to-do list that includes: change last name, get bank account, get work, have breakdowns only in front of best friend and not in front of children, find rare preschool slot for son midyear in Manhattan, get along with three generations of family in tight quarters, find a man who can plant one great and romantic kiss, accept self, accept love, be happy.
She cries, she dates, she (and her mother and father and children) get the flu, and then, just when she least expects it, Isabel falls in love.
With humility and a refreshing sense of humor, Isabel stumbles many times but also laughs, forgives, discovers new treasures from old friends, marries again, and more than that, finds good love itself within and around her.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this polished though repetitive second work, actress and author Gillies (Happens Every Day) returns to her husband's leaving her and their two small sons, only to find she's probably better off. Gillies the former wife of an Oberlin College English professor who found a more sympathetic connection with another woman in the department (names have been changed), even though the married couple had two small sons and a newly renovated house in Oberlin, Ohio exiles herself to New York City, moving back into the home of her parents on the Upper West Side. While they are gracious and loving to the kids, Gillies, 35, doesn't want to be thrust back into the roll of the adolescent; she's angry and conflicted about her traitorous husband; the china she requests him to send arrives smashed; she has to endure the ritual of divorce signing with her strangely blank ex-husband; and she recognizes that her parents have other plans for their retirement. ("Mum, did I ruin your life?"). How to spend comfortable time with her in-laws? Will she learn from her mistakes, falling for unsuitable guys who routinely dump her? Should her ex's new woman have access to the kids? Gillies dispenses advice with a smarmy suavity that appears to have coated the rawness wrought by this senseless marital rupture.
Customer Reviews
Just beautiful
Loved this heartfelt story of hope.