This novel made me emphathize with a woman who left her children. Impossible! ( )

This was so good, I'm fairly certain I'll read it again. Classic Anne Tyler. ( )

Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "Was thinking zero recall, but then recalled the woman leaving her husband and children (permanently) from the beach while on vacation. Based in MD." ( )

I read this book years ago, but still think about it occasionally. That's how I know it had a lot to say. ( )

I’m struggling with this “run away from your children/family” trope at this stage in my life. I guess it has to be done in a certain way for me to appreciate it. I liked Chopin’s “The Awakening,” in its societal nonconformity, but hated Ann Patchet’s “Saint of Liars,” where it felt more “pathological” (someone who was not bucking societal expectation, but felt compelled to walk away for undefinable reasons).

Here it was done in a way that kept me reading (a little less conventional in that others were aware of her location, plus I wanted to see where it would lead), but the ending pissed me off (maybe it was meant to!🤣). I feel like I invested all this time to be brought full circle to an unsatisfying situation.

I get it. She’s unhappy, unsatisfied, ignored, and feeling insignificant and unfulfilled. So let’s upchuck everything, create a different version of self, feel wanted and needed, but then upchuck everything again and go back to situation number one. I’m over Delia and Sam!🙄

I’ve since moved on to Saint Maybe, which I’m really enjoying!🤗

Quotes I liked:

“Sometimes she felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family’s edges.”
“Her entire marriage unrolled itself before her: ancient hurts and humiliations and resentments, theoretically forgotten but just waiting to revive at moments such as this.”
💕
“Behind her, she heard the van shift gears and roar off again. Then a deep silence fell, like the silence after some shocking remark. It seemed this town felt as stunned as Delia by what she had gone and done.”
💕
“she had assumed she would resemble a child playing dress-up for the hem nearly brushed her ankles. What she found, though, was someone entirely unexpected: a somber, serious-minded woman in a slender column of pearl gray. She might be a librarian or a secretary, on of those managerial executive secretaries who actually run the whole office from behind the scenes.”
💕
“She had always been such a false child, so eager to conform to the grown-ups’ views of her.”
💕
re Title: Nat talking about Senior City’s (residential facility) set up where the bottom floor is for the “hale-and-hearty” who still function and gto to work, then his floor for the “moderately challenged” that need help coping, and then the next floor up is “total care” where the beds have railings. Nat stated the whole set up was “uncomfortably” symbolic: “See, I’ve always pictured life as one of those ladders you find on playground sliding boards – a sort of ladder of years where you climb higher and higher, and then, oops!, you fall over the edge and others move up behind you.”