One True Thing - Softcover

Quindlen, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099538148 ISBN 13: 9780099538141

Publisher: Windmill, 2011

Synopsis

Ellen Gulden leaves her life as a successful New York journalist, to return home and care for her mother Kate diagnosed with cancer. for her. In the short time they have left, the relationship between mother and daughter - tender, awkward and revealing - deepens, and Ellen is forced to confront painful truths about her adored father. After Kate's death, Ellen goes from devoted daughter to prime suspect, accused of the mercy killing.

About this title

Review

One True Thing is a film starring Meryl Streep as the cancer-stricken homemaker mother, Renee Zellweger as the daughter who quits her top-dog job to care for her, and William Hurt as the chilly professor who lets the women in the family do the heavy emotional lifting dying requires. But the real star of the project remains former New York Times everyday-life columnist Anna Quindlen, who quit her top-dog job to write novels (and who took time off from college to nurse her own dying mother).

Quindlen hit a nerve with One True Thing, which captures an experience seldom dealt with in popular culture. (One exception: the sensitive 1996 film with Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio of the play Marvin's Room.) Though the heroine of One True Thing, Ellen Gulden, is a golden girl with two brothers who'll lose her career the instant she steps off the fast track, society concurs with her dad, who says, "It seems to me another woman is what's wanted here."

The book is a mother-daughter tale that should please fans of, say, The Joy Luck Club. It's not flashy, but it has a deep feel for the way children often discover, just before it's too late, who their parents really are. "Our parents are never people to us," Ellen writes, "they're always character traits.... There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat." The mercy-killing subplot isn't gripping, but the palpable sense of deepening family intimacy certainly is. --Tim Appelo

From the Publisher

"Fiercely compassionate and frank...conveys a world so out of kilter and so like ours that its readers are likely to feel both exhilarated and unnerved by its accuracy."
--Elle

"A masterpiece."
--Tulsa World

"Provocative...We leave One True Thing stimulated and challenged, more thoughtful than when we began."
--Los Angeles Times

"It is simply impossible to forget."
--Alice Hoffman

Edition details

• Publisher: Windmill
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0099538148
• ISBN 13: 9780099538141
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 309