Meg Mason

This is emotionally difficult to read. I was honestly ready to give up halfway through. Am I glad I finished it? Meh. Glad enough to give it 3.5 stars. Reading it is like watching an impending train wreck: You know that it’s going to be bad, that there will be tons of carnage, and, really, you just want to close your eyes and find out if everyone is going to be okay. There are lots of rave reviews for this book, so it may have been the wrong time for me—because I thought I’d enjoy this one much more than I did. The writing is authentic and quick-paced, the characters are witty and dysfunctional, but it just missed the higher marks on my lit-fic-loving meter.

Martha, a 40-year-old food writer, has an undefined mental illness that impacts all aspects of her life—obviously—to the breaking point of her husband, Patrick, leaving her shortly after her fortieth birthday. The majority of the book is told in sequential flashbacks from her childhood, outlining the close relationship she has with her snarky sister in contrast to the cold relationship she has with her dysfunctional mother, to her crumbling present day, moving back into her childhood home. Through the flashbacks, there’s a roadmap mired in bleakness and frustration where we watch Martha navigate the land mines of this disease, struggling with not being “normal” and not having any control over her emotions and not being free of harmful thoughts.… (más)