Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions
Happiness Sold Separately
Lolly Winston, 2006
Grand Central Publishing
296 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446699396
In Brief
Elinor Mackey has always done the right things in the right order-college, law school, career, marriage—but now everything's going wrong. After two painful years of trying, Elinor has learned that she can't have children. All the doctors can tell her is that it's probably because of her age. As she turns forty, she withdraws into an interior world of heartbreak.
Elinor's loving husband, Ted, a successful podiatrist, has always done the right thing, too. Then he meets the wrong woman at the wrong time, and does the wrong thing. Ted's lover, Gina—a beautiful and kindhearted nutritionist—always eats the right thing, but is unlucky in love and always falls for the wrong men. Soon Ted has to fight to make everything right again.
Can Elinor and Ted's marriage be saved? The answer is alarmingly fresh and unexpected as New York Times bestselling author Lolly Winston introduces us to characters as memorable as those of Anne Tyler and Nick Hornby, but who are indelibly all her own. (From the publisher.)
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About the Author
• Birth—November 15, 1961
• Where—Hartford, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., Bard College; M.F.A., Sarah Lawrence
College
• Currently—lives in Northern California
With stints in journalism and public relations, plus an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College, Lolly Winston was an experienced writer before she penned her first novel. Still, her initial goal wasn't to write a bestseller — it was just to finish the manuscript. "Really, I just had the personal goal of finishing a novel before I turned forty," said Winston in an interview on her publisher's Web site. "Even if it was collecting dust in a drawer somewhere when I was on my death bed, I just wanted it to be finished."
The year before she turned forty, Winston took a hiatus from her other writing to complete Good Grief, the wry and touching story of a young woman coping with the death of her husband. Far from collecting dust in a drawer, Winston's novel flew off the shelves. It was chosen as a No. 1 Booksense pick and received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, where the reviewer wrote: "Throughout this heartbreaking, gorgeous look at loss, Winston imbues her heroine and her narrative with the kind of grace, bitter humor and rapier-sharp realness that will dig deep into a reader's heart and refuse to let go."
Good Grief renders the mourning process with such intimacy and accuracy that readers may wonder whether Winston herself is a widow. She isn't, but she did lose both her parents while she was still a young woman. "My father died when I was 29 and four years later my mother died," she explained on her publisher's Web site. "The day that my dad died I went out and bought a bathmat and a new lamp. Grief didn't hit me for a while. I even found myself resenting the mourners at our house. How could they accept his death so readily? I found grief like charging something on a credit card — you pay later, with interest. Months after my father's death I started breaking down. I remember sitting at my desk at work one day, unable to pick up my pencil."
After her depression began to subside, Winston realized she wanted to write about what grief was really like—including "the messy, quirky aspects of grief." Accordingly, the heroine of Good Grief sleeps in her late husband's shirts, eats Oreos by the package and drives her car through the closed garage door. She also struggles to keep living and moving forward, even though she can't at first imagine what her future will be like.
The result is a blend of pathos and humor that rings true for many readers. "Refreshingly, Winston has removed the sap factor that often makes these tales of lost love as gooey as Vermont maple syrup or as saccharine as an artificially sweetened Nicholas Sparks novel," noted a reviewer for USA Today.
In an essay on her publisher's Web site, Winston writes about "finding the comedy in tragedy":
I've always loved novels that are funny and sad at the same time. The Bell Jar, Lolita. If you go back and re-read those books, you rediscover their humor with surprise. Suicidal depression, funny? Pedophilia, funny? Somehow, yes. This seems to be where poignancy comes from — in finding the irony and humor in the worst things that happen to us in life.
Extras
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:
• My first job out of college, with a major in English, was as a breakfast cook at a Sheraton in Durham, North Carolina. You don't ever want to get burned with hot grits.
• I was the world's worst waitress—I spilled entrees, broke corks, mixed up orders. I was demoted, and that's how I wound up working in the kitchen and working various cooking jobs throughout college and grad school. This is an autobiographical part of Good Grief.
• When I was in my early 20s, I went to Hawaii for eight days and stayed for eight years. I learned to boogie board and dance the hula and barbecue in the wind without using any lighter fluid. My 20s were basically one long summer. Then I had to come home from camp and grow up and face the real world.
• My three cats are my writing companions. I cut and file my cats' nails, brush their teeth, and write songs for them. "Life's not too shi#*^, when you're a kitty!" I'm embarrassed to admit that I've become a crazy cat lady.
• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here's her response:
Flannery O'Connor. I began reading her short stories when I was 15—around the time I started writing fiction. My first short story attempts were poor Flannery O'Connor imitations. (You can't write southern gothic fiction if you're from Hartford, Connecticut.) I think O'Connor is one of the best descriptive writers. I also like how she puts characters in extreme situations that serve to reveal their true natures. The way she blends horrifying and humorous details in the same story is brilliant.
(Author bio from Barnes & Noble .)
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Critics Say . . .
Lolly Winston's warmhearted second novel is a natural crowd-pleaser that deserves critical respect as well. She tackles difficult subjects—infidelity, infertility, a failing marriage and a troubled kid—with honesty and empathy for her floundering protagonists. Her plain-spoken prose and a not-too-gritty resolution should make this a book-group favorite. But Winston doesn't court popular appeal with easy laughs or shallow reassurances; her characters feel genuine sorrow and suffer real damage.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post
A tender, wry, beautifully crafted story about a marriage in trouble.... Winston narrates the novel from several points of view, and in the process makes all of her characters sympathetic. Their voices are real and thoroughly human. There's nothing easy about this story. It's complicated, messy, and unpredictable—like real life.
Boston Globe
Winston is not afraid to show us at our worst and make us laugh, and her compassionate insight into the ways we screw up—and heal ourselves—makes Happiness Sold Separately quite a bargain.
Miami Herald
The marriage of Ted and Elinor Mackey, a yuppie podiatrist-lawyer couple in their early-40s living in Northern California, is pushed to the brink when Elinor learns that Ted is having an affair with his trainer, Gina Ellison. Elinor's reaction—pity—surprises her. Winston adroitly makes it clear that Ted's affair is a symptom: infertility problems have caused years of emotional turmoil. And Gina's no bimbo: she has a loving but difficult relationship with Ted, complicated further by her young son, Toby, and his immediate attachment to Ted as a stable father figure. When Elinor confronts Ted and Gina, Ted quickly ends the affair; neither is sure if infidelity or infertility should end their marriage. During their separation, Elinor takes a sabbatical from her law firm and casually dates Noah Orch, a hunky but dull arborist. Ted haphazardly resumes his relationship with Gina. As he realizes that his connection to her is more than an escape from a bad marriage, all concerned have decisions to make. Winston has a real feel for the push and pull of a marriage in crisis, and delivers it in a brisk, funny, no-nonsense style that still comes off as respectful of the material.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) At the beginning of the story, the listener is prepared for another saga of quirky but charming troubles in the lives of a successful professional couple who seem to have made all the right choices for a nearly perfect life. This couple's troubles are not charming at all, as it turns out, but overwhelming and truly heartbreaking. Elinor, nearing 40 and unable to have a baby, and her husband, Ted, have become entangled in the fertility treatment machine that includes temperature-taking, long waits in clinics, consultations, and hope held out and then dashed. Ted is especially perplexed by this frustrating, fruitless process but willing to lend his support to help his wife with her dreams. At his gym, Ted falls for a beautiful but complicated young woman with a long history of falling for the wrong guy at the wrong time. She has a geeky, needy eight-year-old son who latches onto Ted when he offers his services as a tutor. Winston, skilled at revealing layers of conflicting, strong emotion and behavior, is definitely a writer to watch. Highly recommended for public libraries.
Barbara Valle - Library Journal
(Starred review.) A deceptively breezy, thoughtful look at the emotional complexities of a childless suburban California marriage. Lawyer Elinor Mackey's discovery that husband Ted, a podiatrist, is having an affair with his gym trainer, Gina, just scratches the surface of troublesome issues in the Mackeys' relationship. Forty-year-old Elinor has been trying to have a baby, enduring exhausting hormone injections and a miscarriage; Ted has stood by her stoically, even tenderly, though their sex life is shot. Immersed in her work as a top-notch international employee-relations lawyer in Silicon Valley, Elinor is addicted to writing lists and sorting the laundry, leaving little room for romance or even dinner with her husband. Ted wonders why she's no fun anymore and readily succumbs to Gina's seduction. Winston doesn't wrestle much with the moral questions raised by a middle-aged man falling for his trainer, nor does she offer any facile condemnation of one party or the other, delighting instead in complicating the plot at every turn. Just as the Mackeys separate and seem to be making headway in therapy, Gina's emotionally needy ten-year-old son Toby (and who knew she had a son?) decides that Ted is going to be the father figure in his life. Ted begins to tutor Toby, perhaps out of guilt, and then starts sleeping with Gina again. She remains wary, having been damaged and left vulnerable by various men in her life. Ted's initial feeling for her morphs from pity into (possibly) real love, while Elinor, more emotionally detached, attracts the local tree surgeon as well as the young man who comes to clean her house. And yet Ted loves El and only wants to be with her (doesn't he?). Pregnancy—at last—cannot save this doomed marriage, as Elinor laments, "It's not about having a baby, it's about having a family." The author allows her characters to seethe, stumble and emerge fully human. Winston (Good Grief, 2004) skillfully comes into her own with this brave second novel.
Kirkus Reviews
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Book Club Discussion Questions
1. The story is told from multiple points of view. Did you find that reading each character's point of view allowed you to understand their "side" of the story better? Once you got inside a new character's head, were there things you learned about them that made them more sympathetic to you?
2. At one point, Ted seems to be in love with two women at the same time. Do you think this is possible for some people? Do you think he is in love with Elinor, or does he just love her? Can we go from one to the other and then back again?
3. While Elinor didn't put off getting pregnant, she spent many years of her life focusing on her career, and perhaps that's why she married later in life. Do you think that women who make personal sacrifices for corporate America tend to regret it more so than men?
4. How does Toby complicate the story for each of the characters? What does Ted get from his relationship with Toby and Gina that he doesn't seem to feel he gets from his marriage?
5. If Elinor hadn't miscarried, do you think she and Ted definitely would have stayed together forever?
6. Is it possible to have an amicable divorce? If so, do you think Ted and Elinor would have had one?
7. Is it ever forgivable to have an extramarital affair? If so, do you think Ted's affair was, or ever would be forgivable to Elinor? Was it understandable to you, as a reader?
8. Which of the characters did you find most sympathetic at the beginning of the novel? At the end?
9. What do you think happens after the last page of the novel? What would you do, if you were Elinor? What if you were Gina?
10. What is the significance of the tree in the yard? Does it have symbolic value?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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