One True Thing: A Novel - Softcover

Quindlen, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812976185 ISBN 13: 9780812976182

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006

Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER · “[Anna Quindlen] writes passionately . . . painstakingly uncovering all the intensity, suspicion and primitive love that bonds mothers and daughters.”—The Boston Globe
 
Ellen Gulden is enjoying her career as a successful magazine writer in New York City when she learns that her mother, Kate, is dying of cancer. Ellen’s father insists that she quit her job and return home to become a caregiver. A high-powered career woman, Ellen has never felt she had much in common with her mother, a homemaker and the heart of their family. Yet as Ellen begins to spend time with Kate, she discovers many surprising truths, not only about herself, but also about the woman she thought she knew so well.
 
Later, when Ellen is accused of the mercy killing of her mother, she must not only defend her own life but make a difficult choice—either accept responsibility for an act she did not commit or divulge the name of the person she believes committed a painful act of love.
 
Praise for One True Thing
 
“A triumph.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“We leave One True Thing stimulated and challenged, more thoughtful than when we began.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“Like a brush with mortality, One True Thing leaves the reader feeling grateful, wide awake, lucky to be alive.”—Michael Chabon
 
“It calls you back for another read. . . . This is a book of catharsis.”—The Denver Post
 
“Fiercely compassionate and frank.” —Elle

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0812976185
• ISBN 13: 9780812976182
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320