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The Slippery Year (2009)

by Melanie Gideon(Favorite Author)

3.16 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

030727067X (ISBN13: 9780307270672)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Knopf

review 1: I connected with Melanie Gideon right off; she's a transplanted New Englander living in California. She gets the joke of Chez Panisse and Alice Waters serving very wholesome... and boringly tasteless food; I mean you could get that in a New England Boiled Dinner for a heck of a lot less! And she's funny. Melanie Gideon makes me laugh out loud, because she nails life.Her husband is all about terrific food, gourmet food, good food and Melanie Gideon just doesn't care that much about food. She prefers to scrounge for dinner and he would prefer to think about it, shop for it, create it and enjoy it.And then suddenly Gideon touches on something poignant, "An hour after you've put your children to sleep, the ways in which you have wronged them sprawl out on your chest, all two h... moreundred and fifty pounds of them, and suck the breath right out of you. It works the same with gratitude. An hour after your family has left the house, you love them with a piercing intensity that was nowhere to be fond when your were scraping egg yolk off their breakfast dishes. Your hope is to one day feel this way about them when they're in the room. This is a pretty lofty goal."And about forgetting and remembering, "I forget anything good that has ever happened to me almost immediately after it happens; I have no problem recalling every grudge, every slight and every rejection that has to do with being forgotten, overlooked or left for dead. This may be why there is no room in my brain to remember anything good."Melanie Gideon slips from one topic to another with an effortless grace that makes me laugh out loud and then suddenly come up short when she touches on the faults and failures we all have.Really a terrific book about every person's life told in a very personal first person account.
review 2: The Slippery Year was laugh-out-loud funny but also too profane for me. F word seemed gratuitous. Or maybe I'm just an old fogey.I had to keep checking that this was nonfiction rather than fiction.The month by month construction starting in September and ending in August seemed to follow a school year rather than a calendar year. I did not see the purpose.While I enjoyed many of the parts where the author reflects on the insecurities of wives and mothers, I'm having trouble deciding on a rating for this book. less

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