The Distinguished Guest - Softcover

Miller, Sue

3.4

1,858 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061094471 ISBN 13: 9780061094477

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1996

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Stricken with Parkinson's disease at the height of her successful writing career, seventy-two-year-old Lily Maynard reevaluates her life and her relationship with her son, Alan, who is also undergoing life transformations. Reprint.

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From the Publisher:

The author of the bestsellers The Good Mother, Family Pictures, and For Love once again goes right to the heart of her readers' concerns in a moving novel of changing family relationships: estrangements and reconciliations, loss and enduring connections.

From the Back Cover:

The Distinguished Guest chronicles the visit of an ailing woman to her son and his family. Lily Maynard is proud, chilly, difficult, and famous for writing, at age seventy-two, a memoir about the dissolution of her marriage years earlier and the spiritual and political crises that precipitated that rift. Now, stricken with Parkinson's disease, Lily must cope with her fading powers as well as with disturbing memories of the events that estranged her from her children and ended her marriage. Her extended stay with her architect son, Alan Maynard, while she awaits relocation to a retirement community, sets the stage for conflicts, reflection, and new understanding. The visit raises questions for Alan about his relation to his mother and to his past, about the choices he has made in his own life, about the nature of love, disappointment, and grief. The story moves between Lily and Alan and among others - Alan's loving, wholly grounded French wife Gaby, their two remarkable college-aged sons, a troubled journalist writing a profile of Lily, an African-American graduate student working on a thesis that connects to Lily's history in the early days of the civil rights movement. Pieces of the profile, excerpts from intimate letters and from both Lily's memoir and her fiction, all form part of the rich narrative as it moves toward its dramatic conclusion.

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