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leahlicious 's review for:
A Year by the Sea: Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman
by Joan Anderson
This is a tough book to rate. I rarely review books, but I felt that I needed to get this one off my chest.
I gave it one less than 5 stars because I have an aversion to the cult of self. The premise of a woman leaving her husband to discover herself made me uneasy and skeptical. Self-discovery is important, self-worship is not. I feel that she often slipped from redemptive moments involving lessons about who she is and who she needs to be... to damning moments in which she embraced her errors and "woman-ness" as a liberation from responsibility and reconciliation.
The beauty of this fluctuation lies in the fact that they separated and did not divorce, making the book a happy ending where both rediscover that life necessitates liveliness but not at the exclusion of community. If her life story ended in divorce, I would have given this book 2 stars.. not because of the divorce itself but because the marriage would be replaced by self-importance. Naturally when a woman finds herself naked and swimming with seals she has a bloated sense of happiness. In just the same way that a new romance has speed and passion and hypercolor, the romance of drinking wine by the sea and allowing oneself to be spontaneous and with few responsibilities (her husband still pays for most of her year-long adventure alone with very little credit or appreciation) is an emotional high that promises to last but that has never been designed to have staying power.
It also got one less than 5 stars because she hit me over the head with metaphor after metaphor after metaphor. The writing is excellent at points and unbearably tedious at others. Her chapter dedicated to her night before she and her husband reunited.. the night that she spent alone on a deserted beach.. was difficult to trudge through. (If she were to write my last sentence, she'd say, "That chapter of my life was difficult to trudge through, like feet sinking into the sand, slowing every moment, every moment demanding to be taken in with the greatest care and concentration." -- but then, I'm putting words into her mouth.)
Nevertheless, I gave the book one more than 3 stars because it is a book I won't soon forget. I was appalled at how many faults the two of us share, as well. I think that I learned some good things from her memoir.. hopefully learning from her mistakes so that I don't make them myself.
I would recommend this book, but with caution. If you can manage to not be wooed by the tearing apart of relationships and still embrace the need of married people to be independent, read away. Every memoir should be carefully scrutinized, separating the wheat from the chaff.
I gave it one less than 5 stars because I have an aversion to the cult of self. The premise of a woman leaving her husband to discover herself made me uneasy and skeptical. Self-discovery is important, self-worship is not. I feel that she often slipped from redemptive moments involving lessons about who she is and who she needs to be... to damning moments in which she embraced her errors and "woman-ness" as a liberation from responsibility and reconciliation.
The beauty of this fluctuation lies in the fact that they separated and did not divorce, making the book a happy ending where both rediscover that life necessitates liveliness but not at the exclusion of community. If her life story ended in divorce, I would have given this book 2 stars.. not because of the divorce itself but because the marriage would be replaced by self-importance. Naturally when a woman finds herself naked and swimming with seals she has a bloated sense of happiness. In just the same way that a new romance has speed and passion and hypercolor, the romance of drinking wine by the sea and allowing oneself to be spontaneous and with few responsibilities (her husband still pays for most of her year-long adventure alone with very little credit or appreciation) is an emotional high that promises to last but that has never been designed to have staying power.
It also got one less than 5 stars because she hit me over the head with metaphor after metaphor after metaphor. The writing is excellent at points and unbearably tedious at others. Her chapter dedicated to her night before she and her husband reunited.. the night that she spent alone on a deserted beach.. was difficult to trudge through. (If she were to write my last sentence, she'd say, "That chapter of my life was difficult to trudge through, like feet sinking into the sand, slowing every moment, every moment demanding to be taken in with the greatest care and concentration." -- but then, I'm putting words into her mouth.)
Nevertheless, I gave the book one more than 3 stars because it is a book I won't soon forget. I was appalled at how many faults the two of us share, as well. I think that I learned some good things from her memoir.. hopefully learning from her mistakes so that I don't make them myself.
I would recommend this book, but with caution. If you can manage to not be wooed by the tearing apart of relationships and still embrace the need of married people to be independent, read away. Every memoir should be carefully scrutinized, separating the wheat from the chaff.