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    We Are Not Ourselves: A Novel
    We Are Not Ourselves: A Novel
    We Are Not Ourselves: A Novel
    Audiobook20 hours

    We Are Not Ourselves: A Novel

    Written by Matthew Thomas

    Narrated by Mare Winningham

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    The instant New York Times bestseller The Washington Post calls a “stunning…superbly rendered” novel, and Entertainment Weekly describes as “a gripping family saga, maybe the best…since The Corrections.”

    As an Irish immigrant in Queens in 1941, Eileen has dreamed of more in her life—but when she and her family seem to be moving closer to that dream, devastation hits and they must learn how to not only hold on to their reality, but to each other.

    Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on how much alcohol has been consumed. From an early age, Eileen wished that she lived somewhere else. She sets her sights on upper class Bronxville, New York, and an American Dream is born.

    Driven by this longing, Eileen places her stock and love in Ed Leary, a handsome young scientist, and with him begins a family. Over the years Eileen encourages her husband to want more: a better job, better friends, a better house. It slowly becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper, more incomprehensive psychological shift. An inescapable darkness enters their lives, and Eileen and Ed and their son Connell try desperately to hold together a semblance of the reality they have known, and to preserve, against long odds, an idea they have cherished of the future.

    Described by The New York Times Book Review as “A long, gorgeous epic, full of love and caring…one of the best novels you’ll read this year,” We Are Not Ourselves is a testament to our greatest desires and our greatest frailties. Through the lives of these characters, Thomas charts the story of the American Century. The result is, “stunning…The joys of this book are the joys of any classic work of literature—for that is what this is destined to become—superbly rendered small moments that capture both an individual life and the universality of that person’s experience” (The Washington Post).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateAug 19, 2014
    ISBN9781442369993
    Author

    Matthew Thomas

    Matthew Thomas was born in the Bronx and grew up in Queens. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he has an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. His New York Times bestselling novel We Are Not Ourselves has been shortlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. He lives with his wife and twin children in New Jersey.

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    Reviews for We Are Not Ourselves

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      In his lengthy and exquisitely written tome, We Are Not Ourselves, Matthew Thomas brings the reader inside the idea of the post war American dream and the reality of life seen through the eyes of the Leary family. When Irish Immigrant Eileen Tumulty meets Ed Leary, she just knows he is the one, a scientist, he will have dreams and aspirations and they will live in wedded bliss pursue and the American dream, or is it all an illusion. The reader gets an excellent look at the idea of post World War II America, ideals, and realities and everyday life through Eileen, Ed and their son Connell. We Are Not Ourselves is a beautifully written, poignant novel about love, family, dreams, ideals, and ultimately reality as Thomas takes the reader through the life of the Leary family, and all that encompasses family life. We Are Not Ourselves is a book that will stay with the reader long after they have finished. I would recommend We Are Not Ourselves to any reader who enjoys excellent works of fiction as well as to those in book discussion groups.
    • 2/5
      Couldn't finish the book. Though the prose was nice, it was long with some details that were unnecessary. It also felt like I was reading one story, than 100 pages in it was a different story, than 100 pages later it became a different story. The audience isn't introduced to the main conflict until 1/3 of the way through the book (and with a book length of 600 pages, or 20 hours of audiobook, is a long time). Perhaps with more editing, I would have enjoyed it, but this wasn't for me.
    • 4/5
      I want to thank Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an advanced reader's copy of this wonderful book.

      Although this is a three generational story, the majority of the story features Eileen Tumulty Leary, her husband, Ed Leary and their son Connell. The past and the future tie the present family to the life path they choose for themselves. Or do we get to choose our life path?

      The main thing I learned from this book is that despite the best of intentions, the best planning, hard work and day dreams, fate makes it own storyline.
      Eileen, innately a survivor, plows her way through an tumultuous childhood having to face mature issues at a very early age. Driven to find a way out of the broken down environment, she fantasies about what a better life would look like to her. A child of Irish immigrants, Eileen yearns to have the American dream; an Ozzie and Harriet family with a loving family and the beautiful house with the picket fence. She wants to become part of the main stream where she doesn't stand out as different but is seen as successful and beautiful.

      Eileen meets Ed Leary on a blind date and their attraction to one another is instantaneous. Ed is a scientist, an expert on the brain, and an educator at a local community college. She feels instantly that Ed is destined to be her soul mate and future to the world she envisions for herself. They marry and Eileen sets out each morning wearing her imaginary "life is good" t-shirt. In her mind, her less than satisfactory choice of a nursing career, will be a temporary lead-in to her golden vision. When she has children and her husband's obvious talents and intelligence lead them up the status ladder, she will have reached the greener grass on the other side of the fence.

      Life isn't easy for Eileen, her goals and dreams remain solid, but reality pushes back against her. When Ed and Eileen decide that it is time to begin a family, Eileen is unable to conceive. When all hope of a family seems inevitable, Eileen conceives and produces a son, Connell.

      Ed is advancing rapidly in his career and his talents have been recruited by the drug company, Merck. Eileen is stunned when Ed turns down a chance to have a state-of-the-art lab and the larger paycheck to remain as an educator and mentor to future researchers. She bides her time; it will only be a matter of time before another opportunity will be presented to Ed to advance his career.

      When a seemly perfect job offer of the deanship at a larger college is offered to Ed, Eileen again is shocked when Ed turns down this job as well. Eileen sees Ed as entrenched and stubbornly out-of-touch with her needs and the needs of the family. She wonders how their visions of the future have become so different.

      As Eileen tries to light a fire under Ed to strive for a better life in a new home in the better part of town, her son becomes yet another source of concern for her. He doesn't seem to have any initiative either despite the obvious inherited intelligence and potential.

      Life becomes unbearable to Eileen when she sees both of the men in her life squandering their lives; unwilling to challenge themselves and take risks.

      The more Eileen takes up the challenge to change the direction of their lives and to find the perfect home, the more isolated and aggressive Ed becomes. Their neighborhood has been rapidly becoming multi-ethnic and Eileen becomes desperate when Ed is not going to help her escape to an idyll "Stepford" community. She finally locates a realtor in the upscale Bronxville community and locates a fixer-upper home that she feels will transform their lives.

      Despite violent and adamant insistence on Ed's part that changes in his life and moving are something he just can't handle, she sells their current home and moves the family, lock-stock-and barrel into the neglected home in the upscale neighborhood. Connell just seems to drift along, staying in the background, struggling with the fact that he feels "alone" in a family war. He has a father that is retreating into isolation on the couch and a mother that has become a demanding controlling force taking all of the air of the home life.

      An unseen enemy has invaded their lives; Eileen, with her background in nursing, has focused on what she sees as obstruction in Ed's behavior, and missed the signals that would show her a far darker future for them and would explain Ed's reluctance to change anything in his life.

      By the time Ed is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, Eileen has removed all sense of the familiar in Ed's life.

      The rest of the story shows Eileen's deeper strengths to take care of Ed as he rapidly succumbs to his illness. It is heartbreaking for everyone. Too late, Eileen sees that the "grass on the other side" is green but not necessarily a better pasture.

      At times, the story seems to lag along and I felt like screaming at Eileen as she misses obvious clues to Ed's disease. "You are a nurse! Wake up!" But then, isn't it the truth that we see what we want to see and deflect that which we don't want to see? I have experience with a mother having had severe dementia. Like Eileen, I dismissed the clues until it became too obvious to ignore.

      I thought the story wrapped up a little too cleanly and nicely at the end. But that is the advantage of a work of fiction; it can do that.
    • 2/5
      Read from February 24 to March 03, 2015I'm twenty percent into this one (roughly 127 pages of 612) and I don't really see where it's going. As far as sweeping novels about the century, I think I'll stick to Smiley's series or even Follett's. I'm not particularly fond of the main character here and I really hate how she thinks of her son as "the boy" as if he's a complete stranger. There are just too many books I want to read to keep being bored through another 450 pages of this one.
    • 4/5
      This is a really long book....sort of a saga. It begins with the childhood of Eileen Tumulty, growing up as an only child of alcoholic parents who are emotionally estranged from one another. Then Eileen meets and marries Ed Leary, a Ph.D. candidate....her marriage, like her career, finds her rather than her choosing them. Eileen and Ed are good match, but Eileen always wants something more. After some difficulty they have a son, Collin. Then in their prime, Ed is stricken with early onset Alzheimer's disease. The last half of the book deals with the sad dance of these three family members to the end.The book is well written. The characters, their actions and reactions are believable, and the scenes and dialogue pull the reader into the story. The story ends with the resolution of some long held tensions of Eileen and Collin once Ed is gone. I gave it 4 stars
    • 5/5
      Excellent, a very moving book and well read. I really enjoyed it
    • 1/5
      I don?t like reviewing a book I didn?t finish, but since it?s an early reviewer book, review I must. I managed to get through 181 pages of this 640 page tome before finally deciding to release myself from it. I found it to be overly long, tedious, and repetitive. Eye-rollingly so. I didn't care about the characters or what happened to them. Perhaps the remaining 459 pages improve, but I?ll never know.
    • 3/5
      It was a very, very long read. I cannot truly say I enjoyed the time I invested in this novel. But since I had invested so much time, I was determined to finish.
      Overall it’s about the life of a girl into woman, wife, mother and widow.
      I would have enjoyed it so much more had parts not dredged on and on.
    • 4/5
      Thank you to Library Thing Early Reviewers for my copy of this debut novel.We Are Not Ourselves has come out with a splash, reviewed in the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, hailed as a classic. I expected a lot from this novel. And while I really liked it and admired parts of it, I did not love it, at least not the entirety of it.This is the story of the Learys — Eileen, the child of immigrant Irish, who wants to achieve a prosperity and safety that her parents never gave her; her idealistic husband, Ed, a teacher whose struggle with early-onset Alzheimer’s is the heart of the book; and their son Connell. The book’s structure is a little out of whack to me. All of Eileen’s childhood is covered in the first 100 pages. Later on, day to day struggles with Ed take on a different, slower narrative pace. The first part of the novel almost feels to me as if it belongs to another story. I know it is supposed to help us understand Eileen, but it felt to me like the beginnings of a different novel altogether. Eileen is only 15 or so years older than I am, and I too am the child of immigrants, but this part feels like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, something prewar, 1920s or 1930s, something from another time. Even later on, when the novel hits the 1990s, Eileen feels like a figure from an earlier era.Some of Thomas’ writing is so clear, detailed, and heartfelt. The story does indeed break the reader’s heart. I wish he had trusted the clarity, the simplicity, of scenes of the family’s life. Instead, Thomas employs an odd, abstract, detached voice that sums up the meaning of what he is portraying, or even worse, of what the characters are supposedly feeling. For example, Eileen, while watching baseball which is very important to Ed and Connell: “Something about these talismanic objects, spoils of an ersatz war, reduced men to primal feelings.” Or Connell thinking about his future: “He knew that these cloudy notions would come into sharper focus when he was away at college, where he would divest himself of the stultifying habits of personality and the false conclusions of biography and shine the light of pure reason on experience.” This is weird stuff to me and distanced me from the characters, left me cold. How different from beautiful sentences like these: “When his mother finished, she patted the ground in search of pebbles to leave on the gravestone. It was a Jewish custom she had picked up like a magpie building a nest of grief.”This does not take away from Thomas’ achievements here. We Are Not Ourselves is the story of an American family, of American striving and dreams. If you love novels, you will enjoy it. And it WILL break your heart.
    • 4/5
      Oh, Eileen Leary wants the American Dream in a bad way. And to her, it's all embodied by the house for which she is willing to sacrifice almost everything. And, because she is able to keep the house, we are supposed to think that she did okay, our Eileen. I understand that the house is supposed to be representative, but it seemed most of the time to represent materialism. I love a family saga but this one left me a bit flat.
    • 4/5
      It's a very, very LONG story (672 pages), about a family struggling with Alzheimer’s disease...and how a husband, wife and son struggle to cope with the overwhelming challenges they face and with a heartbreaking illness that grinds to its inevitable finish. By the time she meets Ed Leary, Eileen Tumulty has already decided what she wants out of life and that is to escape from the Woodside, Queens neighborhood where she grew up. We see her jump out of the skillet and into the fire so many times that it becomes almost unbearable for the reader. As the daughter of hard-working, but hard-drinking Irish parents in a loveless marriage, Eileen spent most of her childhood propping up her mother and running the household. Once married, Eileen’s dreams of an elegant home seem within reach. She is a successful nurse. Ed is a brilliant research scientist and she can already envision where his career path will take them. A baby boy, Connell, completes the picture. What Eileen doesn’t foresee is Ed’s stubborn resistance to change. He’s happy where he is, first as a tireless and hyper-focused researcher and then as a professor at a community college. The Eileen's family life is a story in itself...filled with complicated family dynamics and marital conflicts, then when Ed is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, the Leary family changes into something very much 'something else". Once again, the burden falls on Eileen to step up and make key family decisions, including the most important one, how long to keep Ed at home. I didn't especially like the characters of Eileen or Connell. They seemed to be both undeveloped and unfeeling. Then there were the scenes in the nursing home that were moving and sometimes heartbreaking...giving the reader insight into the meaning of Ed’s increasingly limited ability to put his thoughts into understandable meanings to his words. I think the strongest and the most beautiful part of the book is Ed’s letter to Connell. While a reminder that there are no guarantees in life is nothing new...Ed has the best advice for his son: "What matters most right now is that you hear how much I want you to live your life and enjoy it. I don’t want you to be held back by what’s happened to me."
    • 2/5
      Hmmm. This was an introspective book, which didn't necessarily lend itself to the audio format -- the narrator had a very subdued, somnolent voice and it began at the very beginning -- the childhood of the main character Eileen Leary (nee Tumulty)and while she grew up quickly amid challenging circumstances (Irish immigrant parents, alcoholic mother (recovering), parents died young-ish)and it gives the reader a really good understanding of Eileen, it still begs the question: what is the book about?? Well in Chapter 46(!)finally some meaningful action happens. Eileen's husband Ed (you get their courtship narrative and their marriage overview and their son Connell's birth and growth to age 14 or so)is diagnosed with Alzheimers. But that still isn't quite the point of the book. It is a beautiful explanation of the disease's effect on family and the individual himself, but it still seems ancillary to this story. "Where did helpfulness end and absurdity begin?" There's the look at what type of person you become when life throws curve balls your way, but that's still a problem, because Eileen and Connell, especially are not always likeable. There are several random incidents that rise and fall away: Eileen's dabbling with a faith healer, her work conflicts as a nurse, her relationship with Ed's home health caregiver, Sergei, and plenty of false starts for Connell. Dragging and a little frustrating. Overall, some lovely turns of phrase, but a sleeper.
    • 5/5
      This is a debut novel that I'm still thinking about. A bitter-sweet story of how the determination to reach the American Dream can blind to what is truly important.
    • 3/5
      (Really 3.5). An epic story of an Irish family. Though it spans the last five decades of the twentieth century, there is very little mention of momentous events from those years - save a brief mention of John F. Kennedy's assassination, an important event in this Irish Catholic family. Instead we see the day-to-day life of Eileen and Ed Leary and their son, Connell - the striving of Eileen for the betterment of her family, the passion of Ed for science and teaching, Connell's troubles as an adolescent and young adult, a move from Queens to the suburbs, money worries. The novel bogs down in places, especially at the beginning. About a third into the book we begin to see events taking place that lead to momentous changes in all their lives. It's a story of an ordinary family grappling with forces beyond their control. But it's also a poignant love story.
    • 5/5
      This review of WE ARE NOT OURSELVES is a test of my writing skill: how can I speak highly enough about this book? It’s not a mystery/thriller, usually the genre that can be riveting, yet I was stuck on this book. I even skipped dinner for it and read late into the night.But this is not a feel-good book, either. From about the halfway point, every page is emotional. You won’t want to rush through a single one.Yes, you can say that WE ARE NOT OURSELVES is about an Irish-American woman from the time she was a little girl. The book begins by painting the background of Eileen. But I could not tell its purpose and was afraid, at first, that the entire book would be nothing but incidences about her life. That type of book does not tell a story. Rather, it is a book of short stories connected by a character(s).WE ARE NOT OURSELVES more than redeems itself as Eileen grows and begins her own family. You will see later how necessary is is that you know that background.You will also see that WE ARE NOT OURSELVES is about much more than Eileen. She and her family face what so many families are confronted with. And no one does it perfectly.I’m afraid to say more than that. To describe it further would take away from the anticipation you need to feel to appreciate WE ARE NOT OURSELVES as much as I do. So, please, don’t read any other reviews, not even the book flap.
    • 3/5
      Would have benefited from a good editor.
    • 3/5
      I am so conflicted about this book. The writing was extraordinarily good however it was a book I struggled to finish. Perhaps it was just too much, too long, too everything.
    • 2/5
      A very, very long, mostly boring, book about Eileen and her family. Lots of unnecessary words in here.. as if the author had a field day with a thesaurus. I began to hate the book about halfway through. I'm happy it's done
    • 4/5
      This novel is about a family and how it copes in good times and bad. Eileen Tumulty dreamed of a better life than the one that her Irish immigrant parents had. She spends her time taking care of them through drunken bouts and fights. Her father was the man everyone went to for advice on anything and who could help you out if you needed a job. He worked at a beer factory delivering beer barrels. Her mother worked cleaned schools and such places for a pittance. She took care of the house and watched them slowly die. Eileen goes to nursing school and gets her masters degree in order to one day be in management. She doesn't really want to go into nursing, but there were few jobs available to women in the early sixties, and besides she already knows how to be a nurse by taking care of her parents.When Eileen meets Ed Leary, a Ph.D. student studying science, she is wary as she has been disappointed so many times by the hook ups her friends set up for her. But Ed is different. He is highly intelligent and could be the man to make all her dreams come true. Ed, however, when offered a job by a pharmaceutical company after graduating turns down the lucrative offer in order to teach at a community college, Eileen starts to worry if her dreams of a home of her own will come true. They live in a glorified apartment that you could call a house in Queens, that is shared by the owners who live on the other two floors. After a miscarriage, they have a son, Collen, who becomes quite close to his father with their shared love of baseball. Collen, however, is being bullied at school and refuses to defend himself, even though he has the strength too because he doesn't want to get in trouble and ruin his chances of getting into a good school.When the neighborhood starts to become dangerous with gangs and foreigners and all of Eileen's friends have already left for the suburbs, she begins to dream of living in Bronxville and begins the process of convincing Ed to move which he is dead set against. But Ed is starting to change. He turns down a job as Dean of the college because he isn't ready to stop teaching those who really need it or doing his lab experiments. Soon Ed starts to come home and put his headphones on and listen to his classical record collection. He also becomes angry at the drop of a hat over the simplest things. A riff forms between him and his family and Eileen begins to wonder if Ed is just having a mid-life crisis or whether he is losing his mind.Ed surprisingly gives in to moving once Eileen finds a house, one that needs a lot of work. Ed insists on doing the work himself and makes a mess of it, so Eileen has to call in professionals. Ed is slowly getting worse and Eileen and Collen have no idea what is going on with him. When she finally takes him to a doctor and gets a diagnosis, their lives change forever. Ed has a year and a half to go to retire with full benefits and Eileen is determined to get him through this. Collen is pretty useless. He goes to college in Chicago in order to not have to go home. He doesn't want to deal with his life back home.This book will break your heart as Eileen has to give up on her some of her dreams and watch her husband slowly leave her. You will want to smack Collen a little bit for being a selfish immature boy who can't be bothered to help his parents. But he is a boy and lives to regret the things he didn't do. At the heart of this novel is a regular family trying to cope with the unknowns of life and how they have dreams that can't always come true, no matter how hard you try.QuotesShe tried to imagine what it would feel like to have always been alone. She decided that being alone to begin with would be easier than being left alone. Everything would be easier than that.---Matthew Thomas (We Are Not Ourselves p7)The real world was so messy, the light imperfect, the paint chipped, the happiness only partial.-- Matthew Thomas (We Are Not Ourselves p 77)The point wasn’t always to do what you want. The point was to do what you did and to do it well. -- Matthew Thomas (We Are Not Ourselves p 554)
    • 4/5
      A huge family story that really drew me in. It is real and uncompromising as we see love in all it's many forms. Eileen and her husband Ed and their son Connell and how they all deal with their lives once Alzheimer rears it's ugly head. But before even that it is a story of a woman who wants so mcuh for herlsef, her husband and son and you know, it's not quite what they want for themselves. As Eileen works so hard to move from Jackson Heights to an Upper middle class neighborhood convinced this will solve all her problems, I worried for her that it would not. But she carries on always determined. As i read in an review, it's a novel of the striving classes.But it's also a novel on family and the power of love.
    • 4/5
      family saga about husband with early onset Alzheimer. good sections. can be slow. not as deep as I would like, but good on the topic
    • 3/5
      Powerful story, though too frequently slow moving and repetitive with Big Mike Tumulty the only character I liked and who disappeared too early...Eileen, with her unmanageable and unrelenting materialism and domination of her son, and her son, with his passive refusal to move into his own strength, did not command any loyalty. I wound up skipping a lot of predictable parts.And, why not give dying Grandma the final whiskey SHE craved???
    • 4/5
      This is one of those books. You know the type. Highly praised with considerable hype. Epic and beautiful in many ways. Wonderfully rendered, but perhaps not tightly edited. We Are Not Ourselves seems to be many stories in one, and I'm not convinced this approach was in the best interest of the novel. At times, it even felt like other stories I'd read. Here it feels like Brooklyn. Here A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And here, The Corrections (of Brooklyn?). Perhaps it is a result of feeling too much like so many other stories that We Are Not Ourselves doesn't stand out to me for its own merits. It's a fine story—nothing wrong here at all save perhaps need for a tighter storyline—but it's not one that will stick with me long. In fact, ask me now for a summary of the story and I promise my response will be shorter than this review.
    • 5/5
      I'm just sorry I have finished! I listened to this in the audio version and just wished there were more disks to come!! How Thomas produced this, over 10 years, is just plain incredible to think about. He makes the characters, especially Eileen, Ed and Connell, their son, so real as the years go by and we watch/feel what happens to them. I was so impressed with how much Thomas was able to write about what his characters were experiencing. I feel as though I could look up to see where Eileen's house is and where Connell now lives with his wife. I wish I could go listen to more---it's a story you just don't want to have end.
    • 4/5
      Points for keeping me reading it even though at first I wasn't too interested. Still....the flow kept pulling me.
      But it came into its own about a third of the way in, as the real story began to emerge. Alzheimer's has such an insidious onset that it is hard to recognise at first. It gathers strength and becomes progressively disruptive of the mind, the personality, and the family. This was exceptionally well described and touching. And the letter toward the end squeezed a sob out, so bumped up for that too.
    • 1/5
      I don’t like reviewing a book I didn’t finish, but since it’s an early reviewer book, review I must. I managed to get through 181 pages of this 640 page tome before finally deciding to release myself from it. I found it to be overly long, tedious, and repetitive. Eye-rollingly so. I didn't care about the characters or what happened to them. Perhaps the remaining 459 pages improve, but I’ll never know.
    • 5/5
      Impressive book about life, family and alzheimer's.
    • 5/5
      This was an ordinary family dealing with an extraordinary disease. Watching the deteriorating mind of a scientist and teacher is heartbreaking. This family did not communicate well and many problems could have been avoided if they had spoken with each other. I thought it was well done and gave an insight to this terrible disease.
    • 3/5
      We Are Not Ourselves, Matthew Thomas, author, Although the illness of Ed Leary is at the heart of this story because he morphs into someone who is no longer himself, the tale is really Eileen Tumulty’s. It explores her early childhood and takes the reader right up to her old age. She was brought up in a middle class neighborhood. Her dad was the neighborhood go-to guy. He held court and offered advice in the local bar after his workday ended and before he went home for dinner, which was always at the same assigned hour, served by her mother. He was content with his narrow life although his wife was not, and she eventually became an alcoholic. It was Eileen who took control and sent her mom to AA. This was to be Eileen’s persona as she grew up. She took charge and made things happen, often at the expense of others; although she was considerate, she seemed most interested in her own happiness first. She had the ability to move on with her life and not look back. She only dealt with those things that she could cope with comfortably, and she looked away from everything else as if it never happened. She worked when she had to, in order to get a good education, and eventually became a nurse. While pursuing a Master’s Degree, she met Ed Leary, ironically, a research scientist with expertise in the workings of the brain. He, like her father, was content with a mediocre kind of life, tending to the needs of others before himself. He refused promotions in favor of teaching those less fortunate and remained working at the Community College until circumstances forced him to leave. Ed and Eileen married and had one child, Connell. Connell, like his mom, seemed to serve his own needs first, but also like his dad, enjoyed assisting others. They seemed like a good, upwardly mobile family, but they were really not on the move. Time passed, they moved from one home to another because of Eileen’s persistence, but basically, Ed remained where he was, never accepting advancement, and so he never grew. When misfortune struck, Eileen did take control once again, although, she really had no choice. She tried her best to cope with the situation she faced, but sometimes put her own needs before the needs of those most in need of her support. She was not always where she should be, by choice, but still she was in charge and made demands and compromises when necessary, especially after Ed’s unfortunate diagnosis. The author dissects the family’s decline as the devastating disease that had no cure and no remission became an enormous burden to bear. The story carefully examines the varying reactions of those close to the family and the family members as Ed’s disease developed further and further until it was hard to recognize him as the man he once was. He deteriorated physically, mentally and emotionally. Through the narrative the author explores the issues that must be faced by the family members in order to cope with the new financial and emotional needs of both the victim and those that serve them. Eileen does the best she can, but in the end wonders if her best was really the best she could have done. Guilt haunts Eileen and her son Connell. He was just a teenager, about to graduate High School when his father became ill, and it is only a few years later that the toll it takes on him is obvious. The carefully drawn picture of Ed’s steady downward progression and Eileen’s desperate reactions, sometimes inappropriate and unexpected, gave the most meaning to the story. However, there seemed to be several long-winded and excessive descriptions that went on and on. The extra dialogue went off tangentially, lending nothing further to the story. Because of the excessive wordiness, after awhile, the story felt like one long eulogy whose purpose was to over involve and overwhelm the reader emotionally in much the same way as the narrator of the audio book seemed overwhelmed portraying the character totally on the basis of feelings and leaving out any intellectual interpretation. Perhaps, I would have liked Eileen more if the narrator’s tone hadn’t been so cloying. The reader sometimes over emoted in inappropriate moments, which almost mocked what she was describing rather than lending it the appropriate gravitas that it required. I also read the print copy for clarification of some points, and I think the print copy was superior.The best part of the book is its exploration of Alzheimer’s Disease and how it effects others, besides the victim. It points out that the ability to communicate may not be the problem, rather it is the lack of communication that is at the heart of most of life’s crises. The guilt and shame that often follow in the wake of illness and death is most often misplaced. The book attempts to do too much. There is too much philosophy, too much emotion, too much description. Nothing is really left to think about because the author attempts to provide all of the answers. In the end, the lack of communication between those that could and those that couldn’t, created chaos and misunderstandings, failures of purpose and moments of misconduct. Sometimes it necessitated starting life over again.
    • 4/5
      The novel explores an ordinary life, difficulties with differences in goals and ethics in a marriage, unexpected tragedy, coping and continuing on. We all bring our own upbringing and background with us when we marry. It can be very tricky reconciling differences. This book touches on the Irish American husband and the wife trying to deal with his different goals and viewpoints. A good tale of an ordinary life, sometimes a bit dull but overall, interesting and inciteful.