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Longest Date, The: Life As A Wife (2014)

by Cindy Chupack(Favorite Author)

3.43 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1480568031 (ISBN13: 9781480568037)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Brilliance Audio

review 1: In general, I'm not a huge fan of essay collections and am more partial to continuous narratives, so when I read Chupak's NYTimes piece, which was excerpted from this memoir, I bought the book because I loved her essay but I thought I might not love the whole book as much.I was so wrong - I loved the entire book.For one, Chupak does a great job weaving the essays together so the book feels like one continuous story, and as each chapter ended, I couldn't help starting the next, and the whole thing felt like one great story by the end.Moreover, the book is just hands down hilarious. It's one thing to be able to include a funny paragraph here and there within a book, but Chupak's sense of humor had me laughing and totally engaged throughout the memoir. I was really struck by ... moreher mastery of voice and tone, so that her humor felt pretty pitch-perfect to me.Ultimately, though, the memoir went beyond just humor and a propulsive narrative and it gave me things to think about even after I was done reading. Chupak is baldly honest when she discusses her marriage, and yet she does so in a way that still lets her incredible tenderness and love for her husband shine through. I found this balance really interesting. She addresses topics such as her mixed feeling as a successful woman who earns more than her husband and therein really captures the ambivalence I think a lot of women feel today around issues of success, dependence/autonomy, and marriage. She also writes movingly but not melodramatically at all about her struggles to become a parent, and I was especially taken with how she managed to render this section of the book both incredibly evocative but also restrained (in part by including an essay her husband wrote, which allows a much rawer portrait of pain over pregnancy loss than her own chapters do: an interesting narrative and structural decision, I thought, when I contemplated the book as a whole).In the end, I loved this book for the paradoxical reason that it made me sad: sad when it ended. I love the feeling of wishing I could spend a little more time in the company of an author's voice, and that's exactly how I felt when I got to the last page of this surprisingly memorable memoir.Can't recommend it highly enough to readers who like both to laugh and to think.
review 2: Cindy Chupack has a strong voice and an entertaining writing style but a few well-edited essays could have taken the place of what I found to be a rambling book that bordered on boring. I suppose it isn't entirely fair that I picked up this book in the hopes of finding something to relate to, but found very little of my experience reflected in hers -- which isn't her fault at all, but there you have it. less

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