This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!

July 27, 2015
Harriet Chance, a 78-year-old Seattle native, gets an unexpected phone call informing her that her husband, Bernard, now dead, had won a trip on an Alaskan cruise at a charity auction and failed to pick up his winnings. With the voucher set to expire, Harriet decides to go out of her comfort zone and bring a friend on the trip. The trip causes Harriet to question everything she thought she knew about her past and her relationships. Evison (The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving) chooses a second-person narrative to delve into the mind-set of Harriet, a woman who seems estranged from not only her close family (including favored but distant son Skip and her troubled recovering addict daughter Caroline) but from herself. The time line skips back in forth: from her wedding day at 22 as a pregnant bride, to her attempts to cast off her domestic duties and reenter the work force (“Look at you, Harriet Chance, so diligent, so fastidious in your attention to detail!”). Evison’s voice is buoyant and cheeky as he unveils the deep traumas that form Harriet’s sense of herself, but there are missteps—namely, a secondary narrative in which Bernard Chance risks being barred from a sketchily described afterlife to try to communicate with Harriet. Still, Evison succeeds in crafting a believable and gut-wrenching story, particularly Harriet’s relationship with her daughter and their efforts to accept and love one another. Agent: Mollie Glick, Foundry Literary + Media.

Starred review from July 1, 2015
Insightful, richly entertaining look at a woman who, very late in the game, finds that life remains full of surprises. It's not often that a male writer gets inside the head of a female character without botching it somehow; Jim Harrison pulled it off in Dalva and maybe Daniel Defoe in Moll Flanders. Evison joins that short list with a yarn that, like his Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (2012), seems a bit of a comic detour from his more serious earlier work (West of Here, 2011, etc.). The eponymous lead is wrestling with the fact that her husband of many decades has passed away, though she keeps seeing him; as the book opens, she's working hard to convince her priest that "Bernard still lingered somehow in the earthly realm," and certainly Bernard, "five decades of familiarity imprinted on her memory like a phantom limb," continues to exercise some influence over his wife when she learns that he's booked an Alaskan cruise for her, seemingly from beyond the grave. Naturally, Bernard haunts the halls of the cruise ship-but then, other unexpected persons turn up there, too, players in a seriocomic series of turns in which she discovers that her life with Bernard had plenty of corners that she never knew about. Harriet's no patsy, but she has a way of blundering into mishaps, including a memorable run-in with security ("Do I look like a terrorist to you? For heaven's sake, I'm Episcopalian!"). Evison allows his story to unfold at leisure, darting back and forth across the span of Harriet's life and sometimes telegraphing what lies ahead: writing of (and to) her at the age of 30, for instance, he says of one to-be-revealed matter, "it will be 48 years before you will confide the information to anyone." So Harriet, it seems, has secrets of her own. Evison writes humanely and with good humor of his characters, who, like the rest of us, muddle through, too often without giving ourselves much of a break. A lovely, forgiving character study that's a pleasure to read.

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July 1, 2015
With a tip of the hat to the 1950s game show This Is Your Life, Evison's droll portrait of 78-year-old Harriet Chance homes in on key incidents in the widow's life. As Harriet sets off on an Alaskan cruise, she is visited by the ghost of her dead husband, Bernard (their conversations are a comedic highlight), who held some dark secrets that, once revealed, inspire Harriet to seriously reevaluate her life. It turns out that she has some secrets of her own, which seriously impacted her relationship with her children, especially her deeply depressed daughter, who is still struggling with addiction and who unexpectedly shows up on the boat midway through the cruise. Whether describing Harriet's epic battle with a crab-leg dinner after imbibing too much wine or her tentative attempts to reach rapprochement with her daughter, Evison always depicts her with a great deal of compassion and a keen eye for the humorous detail. Both uplifting and melancholy, funny and thought-provoking, this entertaining read speaks directly to the importance of acceptance and healing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

May 1, 2015

Evison has done nicely with multiple best-book honoree All About Lulu, as well as two Pacific Northwest Booksellers award winners: the New York Times best-selling West of Here and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, now in film production. So smart readers will want to take this Alaskan cruise he's booked for widowed 79-year-old Harriet Chance, who suddenly realizes that her whole life has been based on a lie.

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