She Poured Out Her Heart

April 4, 2016
National Book Award–finalist Thompson (Who Do You Love) illustrates the sometimes-ugly complexities of women’s friendships in an account of a decades-long relationship between two very different women. After graduation, college friends Jane and Bonnie quickly settle into the roles they were seemingly born to play: Bonnie becomes a supportive wife to her medical student husband, Eric, and a supermom to their two children, while Bonnie continues her pattern of sleeping with all the wrong men and drinking too much while still excelling professionally. But both of them have secrets: Bonnie longs for the kind of domestic stability Jane (supposedly) has, while Jane dreads sex and welcomes occasional episodes in which her mind goes blank. A particularly troubling mental break for Jane creates new stresses on her marriage and her friendship with Bonnie, leading to further tension. The novel’s spiritual overtones offer an unconventional outlook on love and transcendence, but ultimately this too-baggy novel lacks narrative focus, attempting to delve into too many aspects of personal histories and motivations (particularly Bonnie’s) while failing to sustain a revenge plot, one that also happens to be hard to believe. Nevertheless, Thompson’s many fans will still find moments of clarity and insight in this parallel character study. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

March 15, 2016
A woman discovers her husband is having an affair with her old college roommate. Can this marriage--kids, depression, and all--be saved?In college, Jane was the timid, unassertive type while Bonnie was the sarcastic extrovert with an affinity for bad-news men. An opposites-attract dynamic made them fast friends--they bonded immediately after Jane's dispiriting loss of her virginity at a frat party. In adulthood, though, things are complicated. Bonnie uses her quick wit as a crisis intervention counselor for the Chicago Police, but her best romantic prospect is a bartender with a coke habit. Jane is married to a doctor, Eric, and has a son and another baby on the way, but she's going off the rails emotionally, experiencing rapturous mental breaks ("oh lovely pure nothing") that may be epilepsy or, she thinks, a curious capacity for premonition. Either way, Jane's baffling suicide attempt pushes Eric and Bonnie into each other's arms and prompts Jane to wonder if such an arrangement might actually be good for the marriage. Thompson (The Witch, 2014, etc.) works to elevate this story beyond its familiar infidelity-in-the-burbs setup by avoiding pat moral judgments; she's more concerned with the dynamics that prompt affairs than thundering about consequences. And both Jane and Bonnie are well-crafted characters, reflecting Thompson's consistent knack for capturing the emotional seas within seemingly conventional middle-class Midwesterners. (She's also excellent at depicting children, so often an afterthought in such novels.) But Thompson seems at a loss to figure out what to do with the characters after Jane's breakdown; Jane makes an unpersuasive and contrived romantic decision as Thompson abandons the more mystical element of Jane's mindset and her odd musings "about the death of the self and the all-encompassing spirit." Good for her, but less good for a novel that slackens into familiarity. An overly domesticated marriage-gone-bad story.

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June 1, 2016

Bonnie and Jane have been best friends since college. Now in their late 30s, they find their lives wildly dissimilar. Jane, dulled by her two-child marriage with her kind and loving doctor husband, Eric, finds periodic relief with blissful, unsettling episodes of "whiting out" before returning to consciousness. Bonnie, a tough, effective social worker, is a nonstop romantic train wreck, taking up with one hopeless boyfriend after another. Jane snaps while hosting a Christmas party and nearly freezes to death while lying naked in the snow. That night she is hospitalized, thus paving the way for Eric and Bonnie to cross the final taboo line of friendship. Lies, cover-ups, disinterest, recriminations, and Jane's determined courage to make her way forward to a rich new reality redefine the lives of all three characters. VERDICT National Book Award finalist Thompson (Who Do You Love) has written a compelling cautionary tale of the consequences of people who trap themselves in the cycle of ill-suited relationship decisions, expecting different results, and who then find sweet freedom in the power of the honest reset.--Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2016
Following her canny variations on fairy tales in The Witch (2014), Thompson resumes her excavation of the fraught psychology underlying everyday life in her seventh novel, a tale of besieged friendship between two very different women. Quiet and watchful Jane and edgy and outspoken Bonnie meet in college, then take divergent paths. Jane becomes a doctor's wife and a vigilant, full-time mother in the suburbs. Bonnie lives precariously in Chicago, channeling her hidden anguish into her crisis-intervention work, while conducting toxic love affairs. Both women are scathingly witty and secretly lonely and infuriated, and their already strained bond is about to undergo the most corrosive of tests. As Jane suffers breakdowns that deliver mysterious fugue states and moments of unnerving prescience, passion ignites between her husband and Bonnie. As always in her enveloping fiction, Thompson portrays characters of thorny charisma and complicated failings caught in predicaments both ludicrous and archetypal. She is also proficient in creating lashing dialogue and diverse settings and scenes electric with emotional and sensuous specificity and stinging revelations. Amid intimate disasters and holidays gone bizarrely wrong, all conveyed with piercing empathy and incandescent humor, Thompson considers the riddles of sexual passion and love, self and change, loyalty and forgiveness, forging an engrossing novel of crackling insights and ambushing drama.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)