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Ellen Isaacs | |
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While I Was Gone is told by a middle-aged woman named Jo Becker, a veterinarian, happily married wife, and mother of three daughters who lives outside of Boston. The wife of an old housemate (Eli) brings their dog to her office, and this triggers Jo's memories of her time after college when she was running from her first marriage. She had assumed a new identity and lived in a group house in Boston, where she became close with her housemates, one of whom she finds murdered in their living room when she gets home from cocktail waitressing one day. The book flashes back to tell the story of her time in the group house and then returns to her married life, where she meets Eli again and find herself attracted to him. In all the lives Jo has lived (first marriage, recovering in the group home, second marriage, and even childhood), she keeps secrets from those she loves, sometimes without realizing it. The book is essentially about how those secrets affect her and her life. Within the first ten pages of this book, I thought "Oo, I'm going to enjoy this book," and oh how I did. Miller writes of the emotional and psychological lives of her characters more realistically than any author I know. I savored the many details that conveyed who Jo was, how she reacted to others, and why she behaved as she did. Despite getting to know Jo as a stable, mature woman, I completely understood her earlier experience of wanting to take big risks and reinvent herself when she realizes she has been making choices to please others, at the cost of not knowing herself. We learn about Jo's relationship with her children, now young adults, and she captures the tension Jo feels in trying to be a loving mother while also conveying her respect for their independence. When Jo and her husband Daniel have a falling out, I fully understood her portrayal of the emotional experience of being polite with one another but looking for tiny clues about how he is feeling, what he is expecting. At the end, there is a scene with her elderly mother that brings together the theme of keeping secrets and it completed my understanding of Jo. It was a very satisfying experience. In some ways, this is a narrow book in that it delves into the small life of one woman; those who like stories with a lot of action and many interesting characters might not like this book. The strength of this book is the depth with which it explores and explains the emotional life of that woman. If you like detailed, psychologically real stories, you will like this book. I couldn't have enjoyed it more.
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