Feeling WASPish?

You know that friend of yours that sends the funny emails, takes her kids to pick organic produce, and married the sickeningly handsome poetry professor? Well, she wrote a book.

To be exact, she wrote a memoir about her divorce. These seem to be all the rage these days. An Amazon search for "divorce memoir" came back with 896 titles. Among them - Split, Eat Pray Love, and now, Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies.

Whether you read this as a cautionary tale, for solace, or simply because she's that chick from Law and Order, you'll find a strange form of escapism in this memoir if you've always longed to be one of those people that "summers."

Gillies and her husband Josiah move to Ohio when he gets hired to teach at Oberlin. As Gillies writes, "I got a thrill knowing I was going to take on my children without help, cook every meal, and go it on my own in a new town where I knew nobody." A few pages later, she and the children (and summer babysitter) travel from the summer house in Maine to Ohio to join Josiah who is already there. When he fails to prepare dinner for their arrival, we can already see where this marriage is headed.

A few idyllic decriptions of William Morris wallpaper and produce stands later, enter Sylvia stage left. Sylvia is the latest English dept. hire at Oberlin. Although Gillies confesses she - like her mother - says certain words in French, Sylvia is French, a smoker, and curiously married to her first cousin (conveniently left behind in New York). Befriended by Gillies, Sylvia eats at their house at least one night a week and asks Josiah for help in her job search. A few months later, at Gillies' suggestion, Sylvia and Josiah end up at the opera together one Sunday afternoon. When he returns, the following exchange occurs:

Gillies: "Bully, you were there for one hundred years."

Josiah: "I know. Awful - Go take a bath- I've got the boys."

As removed from reality as this dialogue seems, it's this very quality that keeps you transfixed from the first cat fight (fight about cats) to the moment Josiah tells her he's leaving. Like that friend you love to hate because she loses weight when she's stressed, paints her kitchen in a yellow named for her toddler, and gets paid to kiss Chris Meloni, you put up with her for her dramatic spin on things. And these days, you need that spin.