Story for the Week
I wrote my first blog post in August of 2018 (Welcome to the Adventure). That was when I told Dennis that I was thinking about writing a blog. Since I was already posting book reviews, I figured why not have them on my own site. We even already had the ahyee.com domain, except that Dennis had created that domain as a storefront when he had dreams of having his own computer build/repair business long before I met him.
If you clicked that first link (and I hope you did if you haven’t already read my introductory post), you’ll see it wasn’t actually published until May of 2020. I still have a lot to learn, but in 2018, I didn’t know anything about creating a blog site. I knew I liked reading them, and I figured if so many other people could blog, why couldn’t I? I joined a couple of Facebook groups and then really forgot about it. It seemed overwhelming as something else to have to do. Work was busy, Dennis was on disability, Corinne was finishing her first year of middle school. Learning how to blog wasn’t a priority.
When Dennis’s cancer diagnosis came in May of 2019, I suddenly found myself needing a distraction. That’s when I started figuring out how to create my blog. I signed up first for the free version on Blogger.com. It was limited, but it helped me get started and gave me something to do. I will admit that my goal of two new posts per week was a bit over-zealous, but it created a nice collection of posts for when I finally transferred my site to Bluehost and WordPress, where I have a lot more flexibility.
I’ve always loved writing. I wrote angsty poetry as a teenager. I worked on the school newspaper in both high school and college, and I majored in journalism. I always thought I would be a columnist for a newspaper. That was the end goal, but it wasn’t where my career led me (unless someone can explain to me how journalism leads to human resources 🤔).
There was a very popular book released in 1989 called Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow, about finding your true livelihood and having it earn you a living. Is human resources my passion? Absolutely not, but I truly enjoy my work and love where I do it. This blog? This is a passion project. I love tweaking the design, planning the posts, writing the Story for the Week. I love everything about it. Is it going to make me rich or finance my retirement? Not a chance. In 15 months, it’s earned me a whopping $3.54. (As I state in every post, I earn a small commission from Amazon when someone links from my site…a very small commission.)
Blogging isn’t going to make me financially wealthy, but it has definitely made my life richer. As I’ve gotten older, I have come to believe that if I had to write for a living, I wouldn’t enjoy it as much. Figuring out the stories I’m going to tell here though is fun for me. Deciding whether to embarrass Corinne…even more fun. 😉 (Just kidding. I always ask her if I can tell a particular story about her, and if I’m going to mention a specific friend of hers, I ask them too.)
A while back, I read a likeable story about a mother and daughter trying to strengthen their relationship while competing against one another—the mother as a magazine columnist and the daughter as a blogger. It made me happy that Corinne and I have a good mother/daughter relationship, even though she’s jealous that my (small) Twitter following is bigger than her (smaller) Instagram following and I do try to embarrass her if I think it will be funny. 😁
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
4 Stars for My Virtual Life by Sharon Dempsey
192 pages
Publisher: Bloodhound Books
Publication Date: December 11, 2018
I originally received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Bloodhound Books.
Publisher’s Description
Glamorous lone parent, Stella wants nothing more than to impress her teenage daughter. She has spent her life shielding Tara from her religious upbringing and has never told Tara about her father. But when they move back to Belfast, hiding the past becomes tricky.
When Stella lands her dream job as fashion editor at a teen magazine, Tara thinks she will die of shame. Soon after, Tara starts a blog to pour out her teenage angst and begins working at a home for rescued animals run by the enigmatic Nora.
When Tara’s blog takes off, a rival magazine offers to publish it as a column, putting her in a difficult situation.
Will Tara risk hurting her mother in order to achieve her dream of being a writer?
Can three generations of one family, who struggle to understand each other, ever develop real bonds?
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My Virtual Life by Sharon Dempsey tells a story of the relationship between mother and daughter. I waffled a lot about whether I liked this book or not, and I think it would do better in the Young Adult category as opposed to Women’s Fiction. It’s more about the daughter’s transformation than the mother’s, so if I think about it from a teen’s perspective, it reads better.
Stella is a single mother and a columnist for Heart, a typical teen magazine, living in Belfast but working in Dublin, so she leaves her daughter in the care of a live-in au pair. I liked Stella by the end of the book, but I really disliked her through about 80% of it. She comes across as a flake, and while she may be in touch with the teen scene, she is completely out of touch with her own daughter. She and her daughter communicate mostly through Skype since she is in Dublin during the week, and she seems to spend a lot of her time on the party scene while she’s away from home.
She struck me as someone who tries to act younger than they are because they think others will view them as cool. In fact, through most of the book, Stella talks like a teenager, and a really immature teenager at that. Stella’s narrations read like diary entries (which is the style of the entire book) and the occasional list of things she likes/dislikes and things she has to do. They often tell us the exact opposite of what we hear from the daughter, which is how we know how truly out of touch she is.
Tara is Stella’s 14-year-old daughter. Kind of an outcast at school, she tends to keep to herself and spends a lot of time with her best friend Matt, who thinks that Tara doesn’t know how lucky she is to have her mother away so much of the time. Tara’s story is told mostly through her blog. She includes what she eats every day, further demonstrating how on her own she really is based on her diet which includes a lot of crappy snacks. We hear about how she gets treated at school by the popular girls, how much she hates that her mother is away, how embarrassed she is by the way her mother acts, etc.
I believe that the crux of this story is that we are not as alone as we think, that mothers DO pay attention to their daughters even if they don’t appear to be paying attention. The description says that sometimes we are more like our mothers than we think, but in this case, I really think the only thing Stella and Tara have in common is their love of writing. Tara seems much more put together than Stella. She even sounds more like an adult most of the time.
***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
Tara’s journey throughout this story is the discovery of a family she didn’t know existed. Her mother gets her a job working with Nora, a grumpy woman who basically runs an animal shelter out of her home. Tara loves working with the animals and comes to love Nora even before she works out the fact that Nora is her grandmother.
When Tara’s blog gets noticed by Caroline Houston, a new editor at Kiss, a competing magazine to Heart, we find out that Caroline’s husband Michael used to be an editor at Belfast News where Stella used to work and easily make the leap (shortly confirmed) that he is Tara’s father. Caroline and Michael had no idea who Tara was when Caroline decided to pick up Tara’s blog, but I find it hard to believe that they wouldn’t have researched her before offering her a spot in the magazine AND she’s only 14. Can she be published in a magazine without a contract, or can she sign a contract without her mother? I also would have liked to see more content with Michael and his family. The book could have been longer, or we could have gotten to it sooner. Either way, it took a long time to get to that pivotal part of the story and then it was just over so quickly.
One other big struggle I had was when Tara becomes less of an outcast at school when her mother speaks at what seems to be a career day. All of a sudden, the girls who said horrible things about her behind her back wanted to include her and befriend her. I kept expecting it to be a trick, but Tara really did become friends with them. That bothered me, not because they suddenly decided to be her friend because they thought her mom was cool. It’s high school, and that is completely realistic. What bothered me was that Tara just accepted it, and the way they treated her in the past was never addressed. As I mentioned, the whole book is diary style, so there are a lot of gaps in the story, but this one was a huge hole for me. I’m a big believer in giving people a chance, but I would have liked to see some acknowledgement from the popular girl crew that they recognized they weren’t very nice.
I’m giving this one the benefit of the doubt on a rating. It’s a solid 4 if you consider it Young Adult, so if you’re reading it as Women’s Fiction, you will be disappointed. Fair warning.
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