Family Happiness: A Novel by Laurie Colwin (English) Paperback Book

Description: Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin From the acclaimed author of Home Cooking comes a heartfelt novel about a midlife crisis and a woman tired of being taken for granted—and a reminder that family, like happiness, can take many forms."Sheer perfection." —Elin HilderbrandTo the rest of the world, Polly Solo-Miller Demarest lives acharmed life. She has a beautiful home, a dashing lawyer husband, and two delightful children. But beneath this idyllic surface, the pressure of being the "perfect flower"of an illustrious family—and a stable, always-available wife, mother, and daughter—are getting to her. The spark has gone out of her marriage, and to her own surprise, shes having an affair. What follows is at once cathartic and provoking, and both may be necessary states in order for Polly to become the kind of person she wants to be. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography LAURIE COLWIN is the author of five novels, Happy All the Time, Family Happiness, Goodbye Without Leaving, A Big Storm Knocked It Over, and Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object; three collections of short stories, Passion and Affect, The Lone Pilgrim, and Another Marvelous Thing; and two collections of essays, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. Colwin died in 1992. Review "Utterly delightful.... Sophisticated, funny, knowing,clear-eyed ... and entirely affecting." —The Washington Post"When I read Family Happiness, I felt like Laurie Colwin had been reading my mail: she was putting language to feelings that I had never expressed and I felt almost unhinged to be reading about them in a book. If youve ever been in a relationship with another person, if youve ever had a family, you need to read this book." —Ann Patchett"This novel is sheer perfection. Colwin is so delicate with her characters that you love all of them equally, whether or not they are on the conventional side of morality." —Erin Hilderbrand"Colwin wrings magic from ordinary lives." —Entertainment Weekly"Consistently amusing and ultimately surprising." —Newsweek"Colwin is a bard of burgeoning adulthood." —The New Yorker"The glittering, generous, delicious world of Laurie Colwins fiction is a gift and a lodestar. When writers speak of our favorites, our literary godmothers, her name invariably enters the conversation.... We need her voice, her heart, and her paean to joy now more than ever." —Dani Shapiro, bestselling author of Inheritance"If anyone wrote eloquently and magnificently about affairs of the heart, it was Laurie Colwin." —San Francisco Chronicle"Laurie Colwins great subject was happiness—whether romantic, familial, domestic, or culinary—and she managed to write about it with both élan and emotional depth.... How wonderful it is that her books are still with us." —The Christian Science Monitor"Colwin had the power to make her readers believe in lifes possibilities.... Her books still have that power." —NPR"An infallible recipe for happiness: read as much Laurie Colwin as you can." —Emma Straub, bestselling author of All Adults Here"Colwin writes with such sunny skill, and such tireless enthusiasm.... One reads with fascination the steps by which lovers in one story after another stumble upon their forthright declarations." —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review"A writer whose rare gift it was to evoke contentment, satisfaction, and affection." —The New Yorker"I have loved Laurie Colwins work for forty-some years, all of it, every honest, deep, friendly, funny, heartbreaking, hopeful word." —Anne Lamott, bestselling author of Almost Everything and Dusk, Night, Dawn "Colwin wrings magic from ordinary lives." —Entertainment Weekly"To read Laurie Colwin, whether her wryly eloquent fiction or her richly detailed nonfiction, is to enter the sensibility of a singular human. Long before there were food bloggers and Bookstagrammers, Colwin understood that strong opinions and witty failures could appeal to readers of all ages and stages." —Bethanne Patrick"Family Happiness displays a richness of characterization reminiscent of nineteenth-century British novels." —Los Angeles Times"[Colwins] intricate worlds—full of people who lovingly revolve around one another, with occasional pit stops in their kitchens, dining rooms, and local coffee shops—have been a refuge from my own overcomplicated life more times than I can count." —Bookforum Review Quote "Utterly delightful. . . .Sophisticated, funny, knowing,clear-eyed . . . and entirelyaffecting." -- The Washington Post "Consistently amusing and ultimately surprising." -- Newsweek "The glittering, generous, delicious world of Laurie Colwins fiction is a gift and a lodestar. When writers speak of our favorites, our literary godmothers, her name invariably enters the conversation. . . . We need her voice, her heart, and her paean to joy now more than ever." --Dani Shapiro, bestselling author of Inheritance "If anyone wrote eloquently and magnificently about affairs of the heart, it was Laurie Colwin." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Laurie Colwins great subject was happiness--whether romantic, familial, domestic, or culinary--and she managed to write about it with both Excerpt from Book One Polly Solo-Miller Demarest was the perfect flower of the Solo-Miller family. This family had everything: looks, brains, money, a strong, fortified sense of clan, and branches in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as London, just like a banking house. The patriarch of the New York gang was Henry Solo-Miller, husband of the former Constanzia Hendricks, nicknamed Wendy. Both were of old, old Jewish families, the sort that are more identifiably old American than Jewish. Solo-Millers and Hendrickses had come from Holland via Spain before the American Revolution, which they had either taken part in or helped to raise money for. Henry and Wendy had three children: Paul, Dora (called Polly by everyone), and Henry, Jr. Polly was sandwiched between difficult brothers. Paul, a lawyer like his father, had always been mute, preoccupied, and cranky. He was said to be brilliant, but he was so silent that no one had ever really heard him say a brilliant thing. He was forty-three, unmarried, as greatly respected in the legal community as his distinguished father, and a passionate music lover. Henry, Jr., on the other hand, was a lout. He had refused to pursue the normal Solo-Miller and Hendricks occupations--law and banking--and had instead pursued his boyhood adoration of all things aerodynamic and become an aeronautical engineer. He had married Andreya Fillo, a fellow engineer, the daughter of Czech refugees. She and Henry, Jr., behaved more like brother and sister than like a married couple. They wore each others clothes, did not plan to have children, played with their dog, and dedicated themselves to kite-flying. Henry, Jr.s large, smelly tickhound, Kirby, was their child substitute and, like his master, he had resisted proper training. It was Polly who had made grandparents of her parents. She was married to a big, handsome lawyer named Henry Demarest and had produced two nice, sturdy children: Pete, nine, and Dee-Dee, whose real name was Claire, seven and a half. These children were doted on by their grandparents, who never displayed to them the eccentricities they had displayed to their own children. Henry, Sr., dwelt in what Polly called "the realm of the higher mind." This meant that often he was not fully present. He was a rather silent man who was set in his ways the way Rembrandts are hung on a wall--with great care, correctness, and dignity--but he was funny about food and believed that everything, from vegetables to standing ribs of beef, should be washed with soap and water before cooking, and that all eggs were to be scrubbed before being boiled. For a prank, Polly, as a teenager, had once put a chicken into the washing machine. As a result of these crotchets Henry, Sr., was lied to constantly. He ate happily anything that was put before him as long as someone first assured him that everything had been grown in certifiably organic soil and washed in soap and water. The pollution of the atmosphere was one of his most beloved subjects. Wendy never got anything right. For years she had called poor Douglas Stern "Derwood," and now everyone, including his own family, called him that. She did not actually refer to Pablo Picasso as Carlos--Polly claimed she did--but she came close. It was a family joke that Polly had married a lawyer named Henry in order not to give her mother anything to screw up. In general, the Solo-Millers preferred the company of their fellow Solo-Millers to that of other mortals, and they gathered frequently. Every Sunday they appeared at Henry and Wendys at noon for a meal that some people would call lunch and others brunch. The Solo-Millers called it breakfast. The household Polly had set up with Henry Demarest was very much like her parents. This made perfect sense: Henry, who came from a Chicago family rather like the Solo-Millers, shared Pollys feelings about comfort, order, and the way life should be lived. They believed in harmony, generosity, and good works. As a lawyer, Henry was very well respected. He sat on the board of Pete and Dee-Dees school; he was a Fellow of The American College of Trial Lawyers and a trustee of the school he had gone to as a boy in Chicago. Polly had a job, too. She was Coordinator of Research in Reading Projects and Methods for the information arm of the Board of Education. That all children learn to read was Pollys cause and it was her job to evaluate the stream of new methods, texts, and tests that poured in to the Board. This job combined some of the things Polly held most dear--service, children, and books--but for all that she was committed to it, she did not talk about it very often. Occasionally a truly crackpot reading manual would cross her desk and she would bring it home to show Henry, but otherwise she left her work at work. She felt that methods of teaching reading were chiefly of interest to other reading technicians, whereas the law was a large subject of general interest. Polly was good at her job, good at games; and she was also a marvelous cook and housekeeper. She was neither oafish and slobby like her brother Henry, nor finicky and allergic to most common substances like her brother Paul. She had been a remarkably sweet-tempered child and as a girl had mediated any fights between Paul and Henry that had looked as if they might end up in fratricide. Those squabbles had been Paul and Henry, Jr.s only close contact. Now they met only at family gatherings, although Polly saw both of them frequently. She had graduated near the top of her class at a fine womans college (which was Wendys alma mater), had studied in France for a year, come home and worked as a reading teacher at a private school, married Henry Demarest, gotten a degree in reading education, taught in the public schools, produced Pete and Dee-Dee, and then found herself a high-level job. She was at her office three days a week, and at home on Mondays and Fridays. This, she felt, left her plenty of time for everything--to run the house, to spend time with Pete and Dee-Dee, and to be a helpmeet and sweetheart to her husband. In addition, she was her mothers favorite lunch companion and a great social asset. Polly was a good listener. She could bring the shy forward or placate the arrogant and hostile. Furthermore, she was always happy to provide something scrumptious for dessert. She had never given anyone the slightest pause. Her family doted on her, but no one felt it was necessary to pay much attention to someone as sturdy, upright, cheerful, and kind as she. Sunday mornings always found Henry Demarest lolling in bed, and Polly in the kitchen making pancakes in the shape of spiders, bats, and snakes for her children. Polly loved Sunday mornings. She liked to have everyone at home, and she liked to look out her window and not see traffic on Park Avenue. She liked to watch families come trooping out from under their building marquees and walk off toward Central Park. Every Sunday morning, more or less at nine-thirty, the telephone rang. "Hello, darling. Its your poor mother," Wendy would say. "Hi, Mum," Polly always said. "How many for breakfast?" Because of complicated legal schedules, and because Henry, Jr., and Andreya were sometimes called away to work on special projects, the number of people at Sunday breakfast changed from week to week. "Were all here this morning. Just a second. Pete, you may not use all that maple syrup. Sorry, Mum. Whos coming?" "Your brother Paul is not coming for breakfast," Wendy said. "He was supposed to be, but he wont be." "Why wont he?" "He sent us an express letter," Wendy said. "Emergency meeting in Paris." Pauls field was international taxation, and he was away quite a bit. "Of course Henry and Andreya will come with that ghastly fleabag of theirs. I do wish you could speak to them, Polly. The dog upsets your father so." "Mother, Daddy hasnt noticed that dog for three years. Its you who cant stand it." "That isnt true," Wendy, who knew it was true, said in a hurt voice. "Daddy never notices things like that and you know it," Polly said. She had the telephone crooked under her chin to leave her hands free. On Sunday mornings, Pete and Dee-Dee took turns standing on a chair next to the stove to pour out batter for their fathers pancakes. They did not feel it appropriate to give their father bats or snakes or spiders, so they made the ordinary kind, to which Polly always added some chopped pecans. They had finished their pancakes and were taking turns standing at the stove to pour out batter from a small ladle. "Your father is more sensitive to these things than you imagine," Wendy said. "I didnt say he was insensitive, Mummy. I said he didnt notice, and he doesnt." "Well, never mind," Wendy said. "Darling, is that nice bakery near you open on Sunday?" Wendy would ask every week. "Its open till one," Polly always answered. "Then would it be too awful for you to stop and get a loaf of that Swiss peasant bread your father is so mad for?" Polly said it was not a bit of trouble--it was never a bit of trouble. Besides, she had gotten it the day before and wrapped it in a linen towel to keep it fresh. The bakery also made the pain au chocolat Wendy adored, and when Polly made her forays to get the Swiss peasant bread, she always got pain au chocolat for her mother. Wendys telephone call on Sunday was a ritual, like the Swiss peasant bread and the pain au chocolat. So were the pancakes, and the pecans in Henrys pancakes, and the fact that the children cooked Henrys pancakes. On Sundays Henry got his breakfast in b Details ISBN0593313542 Author Laurie Colwin Language English Year 2021 ISBN-10 0593313542 ISBN-13 9780593313541 Format Paperback Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2021-06-08 NZ Release Date 2021-06-08 US Release Date 2021-06-08 Place of Publication New York Subtitle A Novel UK Release Date 1900-01-01 Pages 288 Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2021-06-08 Imprint Vintage Books DEWEY 813.54 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:132224488;

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