"Happens Every Day"

Author: Isabel Gillies
Genre: Memoir. Chick Lit
Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 2010
Pages: 261
My Rating: Highly Recommend

Happens Every Day brings truth to the saying, why must all good things end.

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 candid, 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.

Review: The worst part about "Happens Every Day" was that it ended. I could have kept reading and reading. . .and reading. I couldn't put it down and read it in one evening. When I read the synopsis on barnesandnoble.com it sounded good, but then I read some reviews and thought maybe I wouldn't be able to relate. It seemed as though everyone who wrote a review was going through a divorce. The author is real and lets the reader into her life. I often wonder about people who write memoirs - is it therapeutic, narcissism, a way to make money. . .in Gillies case, I'd say it's therapeutic. She's also living proof that, at the end of the day, everything really will be okay. Maybe not as we imagined it, but okay. The synopsis is spot on "Far from a self-pitying diatribe, Happens Every Day reads like an intimate conversation between friends. It is a dizzyingly candid, compulsively readable, ultimately redemptive story about love, marriage, family, heartbreak, and the unexpected turns of a life." 

And, just to note, Isabel Gillies plays Detective Stabler's wife on Law and Order SVU.