A Year and Six Seconds

June 6, 2011
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. Gilliesâthe 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, Ohioâexiles 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.

April 15, 2011

Part two of Gillies' (Happens Every Day, 2009) chatty, bittersweet chronicle of loss and renewal.

"I had to get my shit together," writes the disillusioned author, who, in this memoir sequel, plods onward and incrementally upward after separating from her husband in Ohio, taking her two sons and moving in with her parents in New York City. Separation agreement official and wedding band removed (the area replaced with an angry rash), Gillies ruefully struggled with modern city life after picking up the pieces of a shattered life once her husband Josiah left her to marry another woman. Her situation alternately cheerless and "exciting" (the dating scene!), Gillies interviewed schools and babysitters, revived a recurring role on Law & Order and uncomfortably shared split vacations and custody with Josiah for the sake of the boys. Romantically determined to rediscover that coveted "deep purple, electrifying, all-consuming and painful love," she blind dated via e-mail and tested an old friend's capacity for love. With the same self-effacing prose found in her debut, Gillies describes her journey from the pain of lost love to the land of the living with humor and compassion. Too often, however, the self-described "drama queen" waxes melodramatically, like she was the first and only survivor of a heart-wrenching divorce. Readers who enjoyed the author's earlier memoir—and books like it—will find her saga engrossing and heartfelt, though the writing remains scruffy and rambling. Gillies still wants love at first sight (again), but one year later, will it still only take six seconds to happen? Readers will cheer along with the author, whose heart overflows in the conclusion of this enduring story of life after love.

The writing is uneven, and the author strains for material in the final chapters, but there's plenty of love, humor and hope to spare.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2011
Actress Gillies (Detective Stabler's wife on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) picks up where she left off in her surprise best-seller, Happens Every Day (2009). There she detailed the breakup of her marriage after her husband, a college professor, had an affair with (and later married) a colleague. Here she relays in an intimate, conversational style the difficult year after the breakup, when she left the small, idyllic Ohio college town in which she'd been living and moved with her two young sons back into her parents' Manhattan apartment. Depressed over the failed marriage, humbled by her need for her parents' help at this stage in her life, and anxious about her future, she cries, forces herself to go on a series of blind dates, and slowly begins to remake her life. She finds comfort in a close-knit circle of girlfriends and, with refreshing candor, takes a hard look at her own part in the marital crack-up. When she finally finds love again, the reader rejoices in her hard-won happiness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)