One True Thing: A Novel

Description

A mother.  A daughter.  A shattering choice.

From Anna Quindlen, bestselling author of Black and Blue, comes a novel of life, love and everyday acts of mercy.

"A triumph."
--San Francisco Chronicle


From the Paperback edition.One True Thing is a film starring Meryl Streep as the cancer-stricken homemaker mother, Renee Zellweger as the daughter who quits her top-dog job to care for her, and William Hurt as the chilly professor who lets the women in the family do the heavy emotional lifting dying requires. But the real star of the project remains former New York Times everyday-life columnist Anna Quindlen, who quit her top-dog job to write novels (and who took time off from college to nurse her own dying mother).

Quindlen hit a nerve with One True Thing, which captures an experience seldom dealt with in popular culture. (One exception: the sensitive 1996 film with Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio of the play Marvin s Room.) Though the heroine of One True Thing, Ellen Gulden, is a golden girl with two brothers who ll lose her career the instant she steps off the fast track, society concurs with her dad, who says, "It seems to me another woman is what s wanted here."

The book is a mother-daughter tale that should please fans of, say, The Joy Luck Club. It s not flashy, but it has a deep feel for the way children often discover, just before it s too late, who their parents really are. "Our parents are never people to us," Ellen writes, "they re always character traits.... There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat." The mercy-killing subplot isn t gripping, but the palpable sense of deepening family intimacy certainly is. --Tim Appelo