I expected to enjoy this book because my friends from book club were all giving it positive reviews. I expected it to be all light and fluffy and fun. On completion, however, I think they weren’t giving me full reviews or I just have a tendency to take some subjects a little too seriously.
Once Upon a Nervous Breakdown is a good book. There is more than one laugh-aloud passage. The protagonist is likeable. Her friends are a bit out there, and I have trouble imagining two such different people in a room together in real life, but the author made it work. They provided necessary light for a story that could have easily been a complete downer. I sobbed through a couple of the later chapters anyway.
Jennifer Costas – the main character – is a 35 year-old woman with a lot on her stress plate. She’s the single mother of a five-year-old. She is managing to maintain an incredibly positive relationship with her ex-husband (he left her because he was gay). And her aging mother is… well, aging. That’s the part of the story that really got to me.
When her mother answers the phone early in the story with, “I’m not dead,” I was laughing. The mother is a hoot, if not a bit of a pain in the rear. But from there the story gets so, so real that it was difficult to maintain my laughter through the tears. Jennifer struggles to cope with her mother’s needs and, even though the author still manages to throw in plenty to laugh at, there is really no way to lighten the load. This book may be all pink (pink straight jacket with green polka dots on the cover) but its story is deceptively heavy. At least, it was to me.
In the end, there is a paragraph that reflects words I think every woman who has lost her mother has thought.
"It’s an odd and often sad feeling to no longer have parents… to no longer have a mother. I’m not sure I can call myself an orphan, but that’s what I feel like. I certainly have a full life and plenty of people who care about me, but there will never be a relationship, tumultuous as it sometimes was, like the one I had with Mom. No one will love me the way she did, no one will nag me the way she did, no one could possibly ever be as stubborn—there will just never be another Ana Peredo—she was one of a kind."
I’ve written similar lines many, many times.
3 comments:
Sounds like an interesting, but somewhat terrifying book.
I wouldn't have expected a book like that to have a male author. Did he do OK on the female perspective... ?
I think he did. Maybe that's how he managed to keep the book somewhat light and funny in spite of the seriousness of the story. I wonder if a woman would have dwelled more on the dark stuff (which probably would have made me put the book down, I couldn't have handled it). All of Jennifer's actions/reactions felt appropriate. She cried. She flipped out a couple of times. She did what needed to be done even though it wasn't easy or what she really wanted to do.
I can't find the quote now, but somewhere I was reading a review where a woman had written "I can't believe Patrick Sanchez is not female!"
I don't think he wrote this story as most females would have, but I never had trouble believing in the main character.
I was able to relate to Jennifer because I too have an aging mother that is somewhat demanding, and I feel that the situation is only going to get worse. I love my mother very much, but she can be a lot like Ana - needy, stubborn, and think highly of her sons who don't do anything for her or care about her. The book opened my eyes and enabled me to see what is in store for not only my mom but for me as well when we age. It's conforting to know that I am not alone with my thoughts and feelings when dealing with an aging parent. May God give all of us who are in this situation patients, and may He provide an aboundance of strenght to be kind, gentle, giving, and caring with our loved one who is in desperate need of our care and love.
The book was conforting, and it enabled me to see that caring for our parents is something we must do and the only humane thing to do. It also gave me some laughs, and eased my frustrations in the process.
I will recommend this book to my sisters who help with my mother. I am glad that my friend told me about this book when I was venting my frustrations to her. She understood me because she is dealing with her mother who is schizophrenic.
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