BOOKS: LOVE & OTHER IMPOSSIBLE PURSUITS

"...a wonderful, complex, painful story of love
and self-knowledge."

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
by Ayelet Waldman
(Doubleday/Random House, 2006)

There are some authors I come across, almost by accident, and it's like discovering a kindred spirit, like finding a new best friend (even if only in my own mind). It doesn't happen everyday, which is why it's remarkable when it does. Quite often it leads to obsessive behavior (on my part), I must admit: investigation, research, Google, Wikipedia, reading anything and everything by or about that author. I am a self-confessed writer/author-fanatic, but not a stalker; sometimes a faint shade of green with unseemly writer-envy, but not dangerous in any way. On the contrary, I am extremely supportive and enthusiastic about my fellow author-infatuations:

Ayelet Waldman, mystery writer, novelist, and wife of Pulitzer-prize-winning Michael Chabon, is just such an author: a kindred spirit, a new BFF (if only in my own mind). I met her in the January/February issue of PAGES Magazine: on the cover, pictured with her hot hubby; and in interview, on Page 54, "The Love That Dared to Speak Its Name: No longer on the Mommy Track, the outspoken Ayelet Waldman is taking on other impossible pursuits..."

I was captivated. Here's an outspoken, at times controversial, redhead, living life out loud, trying to balance the demands and expectations of being a wife, a mother of four young children, and a gifted writer, all with the added excitement and challenge of an obvious Type A personality, for which she has taken a lot of criticism and abuse, everywhere from Salon.com to Oprah. She's amazing, and her novel is, too.

About the Author [from the book jacket]:
"Ayelet Waldman is the author of Daughter's Keeper and of the Mommy-Track mystery series [five books about a "part-time sleuth and full-time mother" written over a period of five years -- during nap time, of course!]. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Believer, Child magazine, and other publications, and she has a regular column on Salon.com ..."

It may be a large assumption, but I think we can see at least some of Ayelet Waldman, and her famous author-husband in LOVE AND OTHER IMPOSSIBLE PURSUITS, in the main characters of Emilia Greenleaf and her intelligent, sensitive, wonderfully-supportive, yet conflicted husband, Jack. Certainly in their physical characteristics and relationship. Not to take the point too far, I came to this assumption from the inherent passion and respect in Waldman's writing, and also in the PAGES interview, particularly a statement by Michael Chabon, about his wife, which ends the article (they've been married for 13 years, by the way):

"Ayelet's finest quality, and I'd like to send this one out to all those people who mocked her for supposedly revealing the details--you wish!--of our torrid sex life, is that, you know, she shakes me, baby. She shakes me all...night...long. And she can tie a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue."

That's just hot (for him to say), and incredibly loving and supportive, which he was throughout the interview about his wife's success, controversies and firestorms -- she's a Rebel. Waldman has created a similar dynamic between Emilia and Jack in LOVE AND OTHER IMPOSSIBLE PURSUITS. Through Emilia, she explains the concept of beshert:

"...my intended. I knew it from the first moment I saw him. There is a Jewish legend, a Midrash, that before you are born an angel takes you on a tour of your life and shows you the person whom you are meant to marry. Then the angel strikes you on your philtrum, leaving that subtle channel in the skin between the nose and the mouth, and makes you forget what you have seen. But not entirely. There remains a vestige, enough to evoke a jolt of recognition if you are lucky enough to stumble across your beshert during the course of your life..."

Unfortunately -- and I don't know how autobiographical the storyline is at this point -- when Emilia recognizes Jack, upon first meeting him, as her beshert, he is already married to someone else, and has a child.

At times, it is hard to sympathize, even like, Emilia -- a woman suffering the death of her infant, completely self-absorbed well beyond her own pain and grief, yet trying very hard to learn to love the "baggage" that came along with her intended: his precocious, six-year-old son and a bitter ex-wife. Bitter for good reason, as Emilia is the culprit in breaking up the marriage -- reason enough to give any married woman and mother pause in wholly embracing this character.

And yet, this is one of those un-put-down-able books -- the story and complex interactions of characters, the writing itself, keeps you turning the pages, fully engaged. Emilia journeys through soul-searching and self-realization, reconciling grief, guilt and punishment, almost losing everything, as various aspects of her past, present, and future are revealed -- she's really not so bad, after all, once she pulls herself together; and perhaps the concept of beshert is truer than we know.

LOVE AND OTHER IMPOSSIBLE PURSUITS is a wonderful, complex, painful story of love and self-knowledge.