'Happens Every Day" covers familiar territory in a fresh way

"When people describe a room spinning after something unthinkable happens, like the death of a parent or news you have lost your job, it's because you have lost the context of your life and your eyes literally are looking for things to ground you, to remind you that you are still in your life. The room started spinning, but my eyes found the side of the counter. ... I held on to the counter and felt the groove under my hand, reminding me that we had built this house. We had chosen colors and fixtures and a life and that was more, must more than this blip with Sylvia."

As author Isabel Gillies describes discovering her husband is having an affair with a professor colleague, she does a masterful job of turning clichés like "the room was spinning" into something new and descriptive and meaningful.

In her book "Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True" Story," Gillies recounts how the love of her life and father of her two toddlers fell out of love with her and left her. The story revolves primarily around four months in 2005 when her marriage literally slips through her fingers. One reviewer describes Gillies' breezy conversational style like the reader is her best friend, and she's answering the happy hour question, "So, tell me what happened." Lots of candid details here for the reader to soak in but like the title says, it happens every day. There's nothing too special about this infidelity or divorce.

I picked up her book because I'm powering through memoirs that are like mine. I already read Julie Metz's "Perfection" (and reviewed it in my other blog) but you might be surprised how many women have written accounts of marriages to cads. Perhaps most astonishing after reading Gillies' story is that she says in her epilogue that the other woman -- who eventually married her ex-husband -- is "a thoughtful and kind stepmother, and it's funny, I like her now very much, in the same way I did when we first met."

Wow. If that isn't being the bigger person, I don't know what is. On the other hand, the book was a New York Times bestseller so maybe she who laughs last, laughs loudest.

Writing groups provide valuable feedback

Writers, in general, are loners. We sit in front of a computer (or, rarely anymore, with a pencil and notebook) and think and type. Sometimes, I even have to turn my radio off in order to get a thought down on paper. But in order to get to our best work, we need feedback.

I've always said even the best writer needs a good editor, but before the editor, a writers group can be invaluable. 

"Get other people to evaluate your writing -- to tell you what's wrong with it, what's right with it and how to fix it," sayArielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry in their book, "The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published."  "The more input you have, the more you'll know about how to make your book better."

I have been part of a couple of great writers groups in the past. Both were memoir writing groups; one was a weeklong workshop, another was a group of people who met weekly for a while. Both groups provided kind but valuable criticism to help me improve my writing.

In addition to the five people close to me who are reviewing my manuscript, I looked up a person I met about four years ago at a local book festival. The extent of her knowledge of me is a lunchtime conversation, but she was willing to take a look at my book if I'm willing to reciprocate, which of course I am.

But I am motivated to find myself an in-person writing group (or start one). I think a group will keep me writing, and I know they would help. I believe I shall begin where it seems everything begins these days: Google!

Putting it out there in the world

• 75,988 words
• 25 chapters
• 3 proposed titles

That's where I'm at with my memoir, my dream to get published. I wrote about 20% of it five years ago and another 20% during National Novel Writing Month in November 2009. The lion's share of it was written since May 15 when I started sensing my real job was going down the tubes and my Beloved challenged me to write 20,000 words in a week (I managed 23,016).

My Beloved has read it three times, and his comments have been illuminatingly helpful, but I took a big step today. I sent my manuscript off to five people I trust to give me candid feedback:

• My mother. Really, I think she'll be honest (but kind), and she majored in English in college. And she reads tons of books. And she's on the library board. Really, she's legit! (Even though she loves me more than anyone on the planet.)
• My sister. OK, she's not on the library board, but she's a reader. And she knows me.
• My best friend since seventh grade and the maid/matron of honor at both my weddings. She really knows me. And she's very honest.
• My friend and boss, a voracious reader. She's insightful.
• My brother-in-law. He doesn't know me so well, so I'm hoping he can provide an arm's length man's perspective.

It's kind of scary -- putting a piece of myself out there in the world. But, as I resolved at the beginning of the year, I'm boldly going.

Once I incorporate their feedback into the manuscript, I'm sending it off to an editor for the real arm's length perspective.