One True Thing

Quindlen, Anna

ISBN 10: 067940712X / ISBN 13: 9780679407126

Published by Random House, New York, 1994

About this Item

Hard cover in fine condition with red boards, black spine cloth, and gold gilt spine lettering. Author's facsimile signature in black on front board. Red end papers. Interior text block clean & tight; no writings, no markings noted. 289 numbered pages.Dust jacket in likewise fine condition; not price clipped. * . From the jacket front flap, "When Ellen gulden first learns that her mother, Kate, has cancer, the disease is already far advanced. Her father insists that Elle quit her job and came home to tak care of Kate. Ellen has always been the special child in the family, the high achiever, her father's intellectual match, and the person caught in the middle between her parents. She has seen herself as very different from her mother, the talented homemaker, the family's popular center, its one true thing. Yet as Ellen begins to spend her days with Kate, she learns many surprising things, not only about herself but also about her mother, a woman she thought she knew so well. The life choices Ellen and her mother have made are reassessed in this deeply moving novel, a work of fiction that is richly imbued with profound insights into the complex lives of women and men. . . . .As Kate Gulden's pain increases, so do the dosages of morphine. And so does Ellen's belief that her mother's suffering is unendurable."".

Seller Inventory # M002036

Bibliographic Details

• Title: One True Thing
• Publisher: Random House, New York
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067940712X
• ISBN 13: 9780679407126
• Binding: Hardcover
• Printing: 5th Printing
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

Ellen Gulden is a successful, young New York journalist. But when her mother, Kate, is diagnosed with cancer, she leaves her life in the city to return home and care 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. But in the weeks that follow Kate's death, events take a shocking and unexpected turn. Family emotions are laid bare as a new drama is played out, and overnight Ellen goes from devoted daughter to prime suspect, accused of the mercy killing of her 'one true thing'. One True Thing is the devastating story of a mother and daughter, of love and loss, and of shattering choices.

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