Still Life With Breadcrumbs

Writing about a failed marriage is hard to get right, but Anna Quindlen gets it so right in Still Life With Breadcrumbs:

"Her marriage had been like a new silk dress, so beautiful and undulating, except that after a while the edges of the sleeves gray, there is a spot of wine, the hem drags.  If the love affair with Peter had stopped after six months it would have been a gorgeous memorable thing.  But in love no one ever leaves well enough alone, and so it settles into a strange unsatisfactory kind of friendship or sours into mutual recriminations and regret, the dress pushed to the back of the closet, limp, and so unnew, embalmed in plastic because of what it once was." 

A photographer, Rebecca moves away from New York at sixty and rents a house in a small town.  It's been years since her divorce, but memories of it weave throughout her story--just as memories of broken marriages inevitably weave throughout anybody's real life.

Anna Quindlen gets everything right in this book--the labyrinthine mind of a sixty-year-old woman on her own, worries about money, caring for her parents (her mother doesn't know her anymore) and meeting the people of the  town in which she's rented a sad little house to save money for the care of her parents and herself.  The writing is compelling.  This is the kind of book a writer-reader wants to make one like--a book that you can't put down, that keeps you turning pages.

The townspeople are so vividly described that you think, I would know these people if I met them anywhere. The roofer, the bakery-owner, the clown who really wanted to be a singer, the dog, the beauty shop and bar people, Rebecca, the photographer--I'm writing this to postpone the reading of the last few pages because I don't want to let them go.