TLC Book Tours: Miss Me When I’m Gone

A book within a book within a book... A reporter asking questions about a reporter asking questions...

Sounds like one of those Russian nesting dolls, doesn’t it? At the very least, it sounds like confusing reading.

But Emily Arsenault, author of Miss Me When I’m Gone, makes it work. The book is an engaging, fast paced mystery about Gretchen Waters, a writer who dies “accidentally" while on a book tour, her very pregnant friend, Jamie, who becomes both literary executor and detective, and the series of strange parallels that seem to haunt both of them. It’s also about country music. Gretchen’s book Tammyland is a memoir based on Gretchen’s divorce as seen through the eyes of her favorite country music. And she dies while working on her second book, which has turned out to be an investigative book about her own mother’s mysterious death, 20 years before.

I know - another nesting doll.

Suddenly, the circumstances surrounding Gretchen’s death become sinister, Jamie finds herself in peril, and before you know it, the nesting dolls have been upended and are rolling all around the room.

Miss Me When I’m Gone is a fun, entertaining read, and Arsenault deftly juggles all these story lines right until the very end. I enjoyed the way she wove classic country music songs and performers into the story via Tammyland excerpts (the book within a book part I mentioned). Jamie’s ambivalence about her pregnancy was a little hard to stomach at times, and her growing obsession with Gretchen’s death (when the pair hadn’t been terribly close for some time) was a bit of a stretch.

All in all, Miss Me When I’m Gone is the kind of book that’s perfect to take on that last weekend at the beach or to settle in with while you’re waiting to pick the kids up from their first days of school. You’ll get caught up in the story right away, and time will fly.

Thanks to TLC Tours for the opportunity to read this book.

 

 

 

 

 

Bookstack: The Sunday Salon

Friday afternoon the POD containing all the furniture from our home in Florida arrived at our new home in Northville. Saturday we - along with the help of Eric and Lee, two extremely nice young men who unloaded the POD for us - we arranged furniture and started digging into the boxes that we packed four months ago. It was a little like Christmas, unwrapping all those things, trying to discern by feel what each item was.

“Maybe these are the coffee table vases,” I kept saying, searching for three delicate glass bud vases I had purchased at an Art Fair in Naples. There were sighs of relief (found the vases all intact), surprise (I forgot we packed this!) and remembrance (remember when we bought this?)

Of course there is much left to do, but I’m beginning to see glimpses of the MY house peeking through, the vision I had for this new space.

Today we’ll be going back for more unpacking - making a start on the kitchen boxes today. But I’m planning to take a book with me for a short break of afternoon reading.

The burning question is - what book shall it be?

Because the first book I read in my new house can’t be just any old book. It needs to be something special - something new that I’ve been dying to delve into. Or maybe (and this could be even better) something old - a favorite re-read that always inspires, comforts, sustains.

My new book choices are somewhat slim. The only things sitting in my new TBR pile are The House I Loved, by Tatiana Rosay, which certainly sounds appropriate for the occasion, and How to Be A Woman, by Caitlin Moran.

The To Be Re-Read pile is much larger, and things like TheWhole World Over, by Julia Glass, Bridge of Sighs, by Richard Russo, and The Life of Charlotte Bronte, by Elizabeth Gaskell.

An embarrassment of riches, to be sure.

But one of those will likely be the one I spend a few stolen moments with this Sunday afternoon, here in my new living room at Brookwood Court.

I’ll keep you posted.

How about you? What are you reading this Sunday, and where are you reading it? 

The Sunday Salon.com

Worth Keeping

My husband and I were having a late breakfast yesterday morning on the patio at George’s, the restaurant located in our new condo community.  The weather has turned slightly cooler, with a definite tinge of fall dampness in the air, and our conversation naturally turned to the regular routine of fall activities that would soon be starting. “I don’t know,” I said. “Somehow I’m not in the mood for going back to the same old stuff.."

“You’d like to just start fresh?” he asked.

I laughed. “In case you haven’t noticed,” I said, “I’m really in the mood for getting rid of things, for wanting to make a clean sweep of EVERYTHING."

He looked slightly askance at me. “Just as long as that doesn’t include me,” he said. “Just don’t get everything the way you want it and then tell me to get out too."

I laughed. “Not much chance of that!” I told him.

“I don’t know,” he replied, more seriously this time. “Your dad did it, you know. I hope you aren’t going to take after him."

Well.

It’s true - my father really did walk out on my mother after 42 years of marriage. He really did run off with his secretary, just like a bad Lifetime movie, moving out of state and out of our lives for what seemed like forever. It was a horrible time for our family. But over the past 22 years we’ve all made our peace with it.

At least I thought we had.

Friends have asked me if my fathers actions make me uncertain about my own husbands fidelity, less trustful of men in general. But I’ve honestly never felt anxious about my husband’s loyalty, at least not because of what my father did.

It never occurred to me that he might feel anxious about me because of it.

The “midlife crisis” is an old joke by now, but there are some things about it which are fatefully true. When you advance into that “second half of your century on earth” (as I call it), it’s not unusual to start thinking about all the things you haven’t done, the feelings you haven’t felt. You pine for the excitement of youth, the delicious anticipation of romance, the thrill of dreaming big dreams.

And you realize that time grows short. Every day you hear of another friend in your age group with cancer or heart disease. Someone dying or already dead.

It’s depressing.

It’s frightening.

Looking back on it, I understand how my father became a victim of all these feelings, how he allowed them to override not just his common sense but his moral character and sense of responsibility. So his actions definitely had an effect on the way I look at my own midlife experience. I understand the longings, but I also understand how easily one can get carried away by them and make huge, life altering mistakes.

It’s possible that my burning desire to get rid of all this “stuff” that’s been accumulating for the past 35 years, and this huge impetus I’ve felt to get settled and squared away in a new neighborhood that will last us into our old(er) age, is my own personal reaction to the kind of middle-aged crisis that struck my dad so hard.

Perhaps I do take after him, do need to make some big changes in order to move forward at this time of my life and not feel like I’m being buried by the past.

“Getting rid of stuff is one thing,” I told my husband firmly. “But getting rid of your life’s companion is something else again. I only have one of those, and I intend to keep him.”

I hope I reassured him.

I hope he’s feeling some of the same excitement about our future that I am.

Because I want to go forward into the second half of our century together.

And he’s definitely a keeper.

Write on Wednesday: Streamlined

I just euthanized two of my blogs. And no, I’m not in mourning. Not even sad.

It was time. Everything has a season, and it felt like the blogging season as I once knew it was waning.

I had a lovely conversation  - a real live conversation! on the telephone! - with one of my favorite fellow bloggers on this very subject. We talked about how blogging has changed in the years since we started, about the growing tendency to use blogs as one part of a “platform,” about the way social media like Facebook and Twitter have risen to prominence and almost usurped blogging as a digital network.

The conversation was a good one because it helped me recall the reason I started blogging in the first place (I wanted a place I could express my ideas in writing and share them with others), why I want to continue with it (to share those personal stories which I believe create connections between people), and what I hope to gain in the future (the impetus to continue writing, continue connecting with others, continue exploring life in general and my own in particular through the written word).

But it also made me realize that blogging has revealed other ways to satisfy my urge to write, that same urge for connection which provided the impetus to register a blog and push “publish” for the first time. Because of my involvement with blogging and other social media, I can write for e-zines like All Things Girl. I can connect with other readers through Goodreads and my Bookstack Facebook page. I can even go old-school and call people like Angie on the telephone.

I don’t need three blogs to do any of those things. So instead of three separate blogs, there will now be just this one, the place where I started almost seven years ago.

The place where we meet to talk about life in general.

I hope you’ll join me here.