Review by Jessica, age 18
My mother died after a long battle with cancer when I was fifteen years old. As a result of this experience, I was curious to read Anna Quindlen's novel, One True Thing, the story of a daughter who puts her career on hold to return home and help her mother who is dying from the same disease that killed my mother. I wondered if Quindlen would be able to capture the heartache associated with watching someone you love die slowly, the memories that fade in and out of clarity in the years after a loss, and the process of attempting to live life while the person who gave it to you is no longer able to live hers well.
I must give Quindlen credit for accomplishing all of these things. Due to both her talent as a writer and because she herself took time off from college to nurse her own dying mother, she was able to capture the true emotion involved in such an experience. While reading the novel, there were many passages I knew very well even before reading them, because I had experienced exactly the things she described.
It wasn't easy to look back, to see my life in Ellen's, but it was very cathartic.
The only thing sadder than life, Edith Wharton once said, is death. But sometimes it seems she had it backward. So says twenty-four-year-old Ellen Gulden, a strong-willed, independent editorial assistant from New York and the heroine of Quindlen's novel. Ellen was raised, along with two brothers, by her father and mother, a college professor and homemaker respectively.
On a trip home from New York, Ellen's father reveals to the three children that their mother has terminal cancer. He asks Ellen to give up her career, and life in New York, to come home and care for her mother, as he is entirely too busy at the university to be bothered with the task himself. Ellen's decision to accept this responsibility changes her life forever.
Quindlen presents Professor Gulden as an adulterous and pompous man but also as the father Ellen had revered as a young girl. Now, while she is losing her mother, Ellen also finds herself forced to lose the image of the father she held dear for so many years . The bulk of the novel, however, deals with Ellen's trials as she comes to terms with her mother while attempting to assume her mother's role in her childhood home.
A young career-minded woman, she has never had much respect for her stay-at-home mom. But as she finds it surprisingly difficult to do the job she took for granted all the years her mother did it, Ellen gains appreciation for the woman who is her mother. Mother and daughter develop a closeness as they approach the end of Mrs. Gulden's life together, a unified front in the face of certain death.
...even those who cannot identify with such a loss will gain much from reading the novel. It is written beautifully from the point of view of a young woman coming to terms with how she is defined by her family.
Reading this novel was, in some part, like reading the pages of my journal during the summer before my sophomore year of high school, I shared Kate Gulden's frustrations with her inability to complete tasks she had always done easily. I felt Ellen's cabin fever as the house began to close in on her like a prison.
I empathized with Ellen's guilt for still finding some joy in life while her mother had none. I recognized the faces of the family friends in the novel because they wore the same expression of pity and speechlessness I saw so many times during my mother's illness. It wasn't easy to look back, to see my life in Ellen's, but it was very cathartic.
For those of us who have experienced the loss of a parent, reading One True Thing will seem very familiar and, I think, helpful. But even those who cannot identify with such a loss will gain much from reading the novel. It is written beautifully from the point of view of a young woman coming to terms with how she is defined by her family.
I hope readers will gain, most of all, a new appreciation for the women in their lives. No matter how corny it seems, the old adage that you never really appreciate what you have until it's gone is true. My hope is that girls will read this book and then give their mothers an unexpected hug and a thank you for the life and love they have given them. You may not like her all the time, but whether your mother is a homemaker or a Wall Street CEO, she deserves your respect and love at all times.
Where Quindlen goes wrong...
Caution --
This information is about the ending of the book -- if you don't want a peek at the ending, DON'T click here. BUT, if you don't mind having just a teensy clue about the end, and you really DO want to know what the writer of this article thinks, then do click look below.
One True Thing tells a story most girls will hopefully never encounter in their own lives, but it may help them to see a truth without having to go through the pain of loss. As Ellen puts it, I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display. This is the one true thing at the heart of Quindlen's novel and it's worth reading.
Published by Dell
387 p.
