Second Wife, Second Life: The Love Story - Hardcover

Holmes, Marjorie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385412932 ISBN 13: 9780385412933

Publisher: Doubleday, 1993

Synopsis

The best-selling inspirational writer describes how, after losing her husband of fifty years, she found love again with a man also grieving the loss of his mate

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

From the popular octogenarian columnist and inspirational author (The Messiah, 1987, etc.): a moving and refreshingly candid account of her second marriage. Announcing that ``this book is about the most exciting adventure of [my] life,'' Holmes tells how, in her early 70s, she met and married ``an incredible man'' with whom, for the first time in her life, she could share ``almost everything [I] thought and felt.'' Married for nearly 50 years to a devoted husband with whom, however, she had little in common, Holmes found widowhood a lonely business. But on New Year's Eve 1980, she received a surprise call from a stranger, one George Schmieler, who was to change her life. George, devastated by the recent death of his own spouse, Caroyln, had called because he'd been moved by reading a copy of Holmes's 1969 bestseller, I've Got to Talk to Somebody, God, which he'd found among his wife's possessions. Meetings and a proposal of marriage followed, and Holmes realized that, in George, she'd found the great love of her life. The couple married in 1981 and went on to enjoy a decade of togetherness until George's death--a decade that ``has been the happiest, most romantic, inspiring, and beautiful of all.'' But what gives Holmes's story a dimension beyond the record of true love and life with a remarkable man is the honesty with which she also records the darker side of a second marriage: the jealousy she felt for the years George had shared with his first wife; the awkwardness of moving into another woman's home; and the winning over of George's children--who, though adults, had nonetheless lost a beloved mother. A treat for Holmes fans and, for those less taken with the inspirational subtext, a realistic yet upbeat account of love and marriage in the sunset years. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

This embarrassingly schmaltzy account of late-life romance opens with George Schmieler's chance reading of Holmes's book I've Got to Talk to Somebody, God , which, supposedly, not only averted his suicide but led to a whirlwind courtship and marriage to Holmes. Like him, she was widowed and in her early 70s. Holmes writes of herself as an ardent bride, and of her husband, then still a practicing physician in Pittsburg, as an intellectually stimulating and vital (if aging) Adonis. Far different from the "life of quiet desperation" imposed by her first marriage, Holmes's second marriage, lasting 10 years, proved to be a happy one until Schmieler's death from cancer. "The wedding feast is over," she reminisces. "And the best wine was saved for the last."
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0385412932
• ISBN 13: 9780385412933
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 277