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New Life, No Instructions (2014)

by Gail Caldwell(Favorite Author)

3.66 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0804190852 (ISBN13: 9780804190855)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Random House Audio

review 1: This was a quick read that I found quite interesting. I had read one of her previous books and I enjoy her writing style. The book was an interesting exploration of her personal journey from a childhood polio victim to hip replacement surgery as an adult. After 10 years of thinking that her increasing pain was caused by her polio she actually found out it was arthritis. The journey through surgery and recovery was very eye opening and I found her meditations on personal relations within a family dynamic versus personal relations as a single person very interesting. She seems well surrounded by friends but she explains this as a necessary outgrowth of being single whereas with a family the family is where most of your personal energy goes.
review 2: I enjoyed th... moreis memoir, I really did. I haven’t finished the last two books I started, and I read this through in a couple of days, so that was a relief. It’s just that memoir isn’t my favorite genre. It always seems as if it has to be cheerleading, with lessons learned. Here was a good tale of discovering that a hip replacement could change a lifetime of adapting to having a shorter, weaker leg. It’s good on the author’s struggle with being single and childless, with the grief of losing a friend and parents, with an intense love of dogs, particularly Samoyeds. It was well-written. Just for me it does not have the magic of a made-up story with many more moving parts. Perhaps fiction allows for fewer neat resolutions and more freedom than the telling about one's own life. After all, just to keep going on requires a sense of purpose and meaning; whereas, when something is totally made up? Well, then anything can happen. Or not. less

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