Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story

Gillies, Isabel

ISBN 10: 074358290X ISBN 13: 9780743582902

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2009

Synopsis

Isabel Gillies had a wonderful life—a handsome, intelligent, loving husband who was a professor; two glorious toddlers; a beautiful house in their Midwestern college town; the time and place to express all her ebullience and affection and optimism. Suddenly, the life Isabel had made crumbled. Her husband, Josiah, announced that he was leaving her and their two young sons. "Happens every day," said a friend.

Far from a self-pitying diatribe, Happens Every Day reads like an intimate conversation between friends. It is a dizzyingly can-did, compulsively readable, ultimately redemptive story about love, marriage, family, heartbreak, and the unexpected turns of a life. On the one hand, reading this book is like watching a train wreck. On the other hand, as Gillies herself says, it is about trying to light a candle instead of cursing the darkness, and loving your life even if it has slipped away.

About this title

About the Author

Isabel Gillies, known for her television role as Detective Stabler’s wife on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and for her cinematic debut in the film Metropolitan, graduated from New York University with a BFA in film. She lives in Manhattan with her second husband, her two sons, and her stepdaughter.

Reviews

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). (Mar.)
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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. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 074358290X
• ISBN 13: 9780743582902
• Binding: Audio CD
• Number of pages: 261