Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story by Isabel Gillies
I got this as an audiobook from audible, read by the author. This is a sub-genre that I haven’t read much, a sub-genre one of my teachers called “Adirondacks chair books” because they usually have an Adirondacks chair on the cover, symbolizing a woman who has been abandoned by her husband and has to go at it alone.
That’s basically what this book is about. A man with a loving family and two adorable sons decides one day that he doesn’t want to be married anymore. You know how this goes. He claims it has nothing to do with the sweet young thing that resembles his ex-girlfriends. They try to get counselling, but it does no good. His wife basically loses her mind with grief, and then eventually recovers and forges a new life without him. As the title says, it happens every day.
Gillies gets very personal and intimate with the details of her life. She felt very similar to me in many ways, except that I am middle class and she is upper class. There were certain aspects of her class that I admired, like how men are expected to carry much more of the family-rearing. For example, she cries on the first day she arrives in Oberlin because her husband hasn’t made any supper plans. There were some aspects of her class that I envy, like how they have a family summer home in Maine where they’ve been spending summers for generations. Other aspects made me feel smugly superior, like when she describes how hard it will be to raise her family without a nanny, even though she has babysitters and day care. Other aspects of her social class are foreign/baffling, like not wanting to put too many family portraits on the wall because it’s “too much” or admiring someone for wearing designer clothes, or thinking that an ivy league PhD in poetry of all things, is a perfectly reasonable career choice to make for someone who has a mind “like a cathedral.”
Every heartbreak feels like the worst pain anyone has ever felt since the beginning of time. It’s hard to fathom that anyone has ever hurt quite as much as you, when the love of your life decides he doesn’t want the role anymore. But I think that it’s harder when the love of your life is your spouse. That, after all, is what marriage is about, promises that you will not leave, that your love will not falter, that no matter what happens, you will not abandon the family you helped create. Gilles’ pain is raw and real, and I cried more than once while listening to this. I believed her grief and heartache, even if I didn’t quite believe the gentle way she lauded her ex-husband.
The pure unfairness of it kills me. Why is it that if you run over a pedestrian, causing them pain that lasted for months and months, you’d be charged criminally (even if it’s an accident), but if you decide that you’re tired of your spouse and want a different one instead, you can cause months and months of anguish without going to jail for it? Gilles says that perhaps she wasn’t very nice, or that perhaps she could have been a better wife, but it seems to me that her only mistake was in not recognizing that he’d done this before. (And, frankly, would likely do it again, trading in wives for a different model every few years until the music stopped.)
I liked Gilles’ voice. She’s an actress, and has a pleasant modulation. There were some weird production inconsistencies that I noticed, but they didn’t ruin the book for me.
I haven’t read many books in this sub-genre, so I don’t know how it differs from others, but it’s a good read for women who have been through a divorce, or know someone who has, and want to share stories.
