Happens Every Day: LC's Must-Read Book of the Week

I love memoirs. Perhaps it’s because I’m a storyteller; as a writer, it’s second nature to explain a personal experience to someone as though I’m writing my own memoir. Somehow, telling people the bullshit that I’ve been through seems to help them through difficult times and gain some clarity they didn’t have before.

This is by far one of the most incredible memoirs I’ve ever read. Isabel Gilles’ voice in the book shines through; you can tell she is a novice at the whole writing thing, but it’s that voice—a real, true voice of a woman who survived the worst possible heartache—that makes even the biggest cynic empathize with her.

When her husband gets a new job in a small town in the Midwest as a professor at a university, Isabel is forced to move her two young sons and become a stay-at-home Mom. When he begins coming home a little later, she realizes he is having an affair with the woman who just started working in his department, and they finally decide to be together, despite much begging and pleading from Isabel. There is a scene in the book where she suspects the woman, who she befriended, was having an affair with her husband, and when she talks about infidelity while they are in a movie theatre together, her husband’s mistress turns to her and says, “It happens every day.”

When I read this book for the first time in the summer, it hit close to home for a few reasons, personal reasons…and flashbacks of the times I’ve been hurt and felt broken flooded back. When I was staying with Auntie Gloria in Las Cruces, New Mexico in summer this past year, she let me (as usual) stay in her bedroom, and as I laid in that big bed at night and read most of the book, I found myself in a little ball, crying as I read the last part of the memoir. It was so real and so heartfelt, it pulled at my heartstrings in a way a memoir ideally should.

Pick up a copy for yourself at your local library if you’re a recessionista, or if you’re the type who likes to add a new and wonderful book to your bookshelf, visit your local Barnes and Noble, or www.bn.com, or Borders Books and Music today. Everyone has a story, and this one desperately needed to be told.