Happens Every Day

June 29, 2009
Gillies left her recurring role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
to follow her poet-professor husband to Oberlin, Ohio, when he got a tenure-track position in the English department. She threw herself into caring for her two sons, renovating an old house and teaching drama part-time—but her idyllic life was shattered when her husband decided he didn't want to be married anymore—or at least, not married to Gillies. (He subsequently wed a fellow professor.) Gillies brings both humor and sorrow to the narration. Despite a tendency to trail off at the end of sentences, which leaves listeners straining to hear the completion of a thought, she gives a brave performance that will have her audience cheering as she pluckily reassembles the pieces of her broken life. A Scribner hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 23).

Isabel Gillies's memoir plods as she narrates the events surrounding the collapse of her marriage. As if she's side-stepping the central drama, she relates details about her family, his family, their meeting, and their house renovation and move. As an actress, Gillies certainly knows the importance of theatrical elements, and there are flashes of emotion that help listeners feel her frustration as she adjusts to her husband's changed affections and figures out how to care for her two young sons alone. Is she escaping sadness with the neutral tone of her writing and narration, or representing the ordinariness in her situation? At the end of the book there's one sentence that refers to a happy ending. Has she left out part of her story, or is she setting us up for a sequel? S.W. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine