Miller's Valley (Quindlen)

Miller's Valley 
Anna Quindlen, 2016
Random House
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812996081


Summary
In a small town on the verge of big change, a young woman unearths deep secrets about her family and unexpected truths about herself.

For generations the Millers have lived in Miller’s Valley. Mimi Miller tells about her life with intimacy and honesty.

As Mimi eavesdrops on her parents and quietly observes the people around her, she discovers more and more about the toxicity of family secrets, the dangers of gossip, the flaws of marriage, the inequalities of friendship and the risks of passion, loyalty, and love.

Home, as Mimi begins to realize, can be “a place where it’s just as easy to feel lost as it is to feel content.”
 
Miller’s Valley is a masterly study of family, memory, loss, and, ultimately, discovery, of finding true identity and a new vision of home. As Mimi says, “No one ever leaves the town where they grew up, even if they go.” Miller’s Valley reminds us that the place where you grew up can disappear, and the people in it too, but all will live on in your heart forever.
(From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 8, 1952
• Where—Philadelphia, PA, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times column
• Currently—New York, New York


Anna Quindlen could have settled onto a nice, lofty career plateau in the early 1990s, when she had won a Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times column; but she took an unconventional turn, and achieved a richer result.

Quindlen, the third woman to hold a place among the New York Times' Op-Ed columnists, had already published two successful collections of her work when she decided to leave the paper in 1995. But it was the two novels she had produced that led her to seek a future beyond her column.

Quindlen had a warm, if not entirely uncritical, reception as a novelist. Her first book, Object Lessons, focused on an Irish American family in suburban New York in the 1960s. It was a bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of 1991, but was also criticized for not being as engaging as it could have been. One True Thing, Quindlen's exploration of an ambitious daughter's journey home to take care of her terminally ill mother, was stronger still—a heartbreaker that was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep. But Quindlen's fiction clearly benefited from her decision to leave the Times. Three years after that controversial departure, she earned her best reviews yet with Black and Blue, a chronicle of escape from domestic abuse.

Quindlen's novels are thoughtful explorations centering on women who may not start out strong, but who ultimately find some core within themselves as a result of what happens in the story. Her nonfiction meditations—particularly A Short Guide to a Happy Life and her collection of "Life in the 30s" columns, Living Out Loud—often encourage this same transition, urging others to look within themselves and not get caught up in what society would plan for them. It's an approach Quindlen herself has obviously had success with.

Extras
• To those who expressed surprise at Quindlen's apparent switch from columnist to novelist, the author points out that her first love was always fiction. She told fans in a Barnes & Noble.com chat, "I really only went into the newspaper business to support my fiction habit, but then discovered, first of all, that I loved reporting for its own sake and, second, that journalism would be invaluable experience for writing novels."

• Quindlen joined Newsweek as a columnist in 1999. She began her career at the New York Post in 1974, jumping to the New York Times in 1977.

• Quindlen's prowess as a columnist and prescriber of advice has made her a popular pick for commencement addresses, a sideline that ultimately inspired her 2000 title A Short Guide to a Happy Life Quindlen's message tends to be a combination of stopping to smell the flowers and being true to yourself. Quindlen told students at Mount Holyoke in 1999, "Begin to say no to the Greek chorus that thinks it knows the parameters of a happy life when all it knows is the homogenization of human experience. Listen to that small voice from inside you, that tells you to go another way. George Eliot wrote, 'It is never too late to be what you might have been.' It is never too early, either. And it will make all the difference in the world."

• Studying fiction at Barnard with the literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick, Quindlen's senior thesis was a collection of stories, one of which she sold to Seventeen magazine. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
What does home really mean? Is it the people around you who make a place familiar and loved, or is it the tie to land that’s been in your family for generations? Anna Quindlen’s mesmerizing new novel investigates both,.... What do you do when your way of life is gone? Who do you become? And what do you now consider home? Quindlen makes her characters so richly alive, so believable, that it’s impossible not to feel every doubt and dream they harbor, or share every tragedy that befalls them.
Caroline Leavitt - New York Times Book Review


Memories flow like fast-moving water in Miller's Valley, Anna Quindlen's new family novel, a coming-of-age story that reminds us that the past continues to wash over us even as we move away from the places and events that formed us.... [T]he Millers and their neighbors... maintain an uncanny resemblance to our own friends and families.... Quindlen's provocative novel will have you flipping through the pages of your own family history and memories even as you can't stop reading about the Millers.
Carol Memmott - Chicago Tribune


[A] moving exploration of family and notions of home.... Though the pacing is somewhat uneven, Quindlen’s prose is crisp and her insights resonant. This coming-of-age story is driven as much by the fully realized characters as it is by the astute ideas about progress and place.
Publishers Weekly


[A young girl] comes to terms with life as it should be versus life as it is. This is vintage Quindlen,...a compelling family tale rich in recognizable characters, resplendent storytelling, and reflective observations. It is also an affectionate and appreciative portrait of a disappearing way of life. —Carol Haggass
Booklist


[A] young woman buffeted by upheavals in her personal life.... Perhaps there is a bit too much summing up in the book’s final chapter, but it still manages to be quite stirring.... [F]amliar elements in this story...are synthesized in a fresh way in this keenly observed, quietly powerful novel.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add specific questions when they become available from the publisher. In the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Miller's Valley...then take off on your own:

1. How would you describe Mimi as the book opens, and how does she change over the course of the novel? What does she come to learn, as she matures, about place and home?

2. Mimi's mother Miriam feels trapped in Miller Valley, yet her husband Bud is tied to the land. How do their positions reflect their individual personalities...and affect their relationship as a couple. In other words, describe Miriam and Bud and their marriage. With whom do your sympathies lie—with one more than another, or with both equally?

3. Why is Mimi so tied the valley? "I knew there was a world outside," she says, "I just had a hard time imagining it." When her mother tells Mimi that her grades in school mean a "road to something better than this," Mimi balks. Is her reluctance merely a childish fear to move beyond a familiar world? Or is it something else? If you were Mimi's mother, or an elderly friend, would you urge her to move on?

4. Mimi says she "felt lost most of the time," as if there was a "big rattly empty space between her stomach and heart." She wonders "whether other people felt the same way without showing it." What does she mean? Is she speaking of basic loneliness, or something else? Has she expressed a feeling common to many (most) of us?

5. Talk about Ruth and her agoraphobia. Why does she inspire bitterness on the part of her sister Miriam? Did you sense what Ruth's secret was, or were you surprised once it was revealed?

6. The book asks an important question about how closely our identities are tied to our origins, both place and family. Do we change when we adapt to new experiences and when we lose what we treasure? Do we ever really leave the past behind us?

7. The book takes place in the 1960s. If you were alive at that time, how well does Quindlen bring the era to life? Was it a different time from now—culturally or sociologically?

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

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