Ordinary Time
Lessons Learned While Staying Put
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A beautifully written story of the sweetness of staying put, Jones’s book will add depth to any memoir collection.”—Library Journal
Can life be an adventure, even when it’s just . . . ordinary?
From the Front Porch podcast host and independent bookstore owner challenges the idea that loud lives are the ones that matter most, reminding us that we don't have to leave the lives we have in order to have the lives of which we've always dreamed.
Annie B. Jones always assumed adulthood would mean adventure: a high-powered career; life in a big, bustling city; and travels to far-flung places she’d longed to see. But her reality turned out differently. As the years passed, Annie was still in the same small town running an independent bookstore —the kind of life Nora Ephron dreamed.
During that time, she hosted friends’ goodbye parties and mailed parting gifts; wrote recommendation letters and wished former shop staffers well. She stayed in her small town, despite her love of big cities; stayed in her marriage to the guy she met when she was eighteen; and she stayed at her bookstore while the world outside shifted steadily toward digital retailers. And she stayed loyal to a faith she sometimes didn’t recognize.
After ten years, Annie realized she might never leave. But instead of regret, she had an epiphany. She awakened to the gifts of a quiet life spent staying put.
In Ordinary Time, Annie:
Challenges the idea that loud lives matter most.Finds hidden gifts of humor and hope from a life lived quietly as she rummages through her small-town existence. SDiscovers staying, can itself be a radical act.Realizes that it takes courage to stay in the places we’ve always called home.
We’ve long been encouraged to follow our dreams, to pack up and move to new places and leave old lives—and past selves—behind. While there is beauty in these kinds of adventures, Ordinary Time helps us see ourselves right where we are: in the middle of messy, mundane lives, maybe not too far from where we grew up.
We don’t have to leave to find what we yearn—we can choose to stay, celebrating and honoring our ordinary lives, which might turn out to be bigger and better than we ever imagined.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From the Front Porch podcaster Jones debuts with a chatty if undercooked memoir-in-essays on the joys and sorrows of small-town life. Centering the collection in Thomasville, a small town in rural south Georgia where she moved in early adulthood and has remained despite once dreaming of becoming a big-city journalist, Jones is at her strongest when discussing the bookstore she first managed and now owns. "Sweat Equity," for example, finds the author, then in her mid-20s, leaving a job in legal reporting in hopes that "maybe a bookstore would bring meaning into my life." She goes on to describe the unexpected emotional hardships and rewards of the work ("The magic of it—because there is magic to it—is never lost on me"). In "Obituaries," Jones explains that running a small-town business involves "googling... death notices" to learn the fate of absent customers, and describes being unprepared for "how deep my grief for them might go" (such seemingly casual relationships are often those that make "life worth living," she observes). Unfortunately, Jones too often flattens her stories by telling rather than showing, resulting in a collection whose charming moments get lost amid all the clichés ("Life... isn't always like the books we read. It's messier"). Readers will be left wanting.
