Story for the Week
The first time I watched the movie Sliding Doors, I knew it wouldn’t be the last. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Helen, a woman who gets fired when she arrives at work one morning. As she rides down in the elevator to leave, she drops an earring, and a man in the elevator picks it up for her. She makes her way to the train station and starts to rush as she hears the train approaching. As she goes down the stairs, a young girl accidentally gets in her way, and she just misses the train.
The scene then rewinds to the top of the stairs, and this time, the young girl’s mom pulls her out of the way, and Helen catches the train. She finds herself seated next to the extremely chatty James, who happened to be the man who picked up her earring in the elevator. She spends the ride talking with him, and he puts her in a better mood. However, when she arrives home, she catches her boyfriend Gerry having an affair with his ex-girlfriend and moves out.
The movie alternates between Helen’s two realities. In the first reality where she misses the train, she tries to catch a cab, gets mugged, and ends up at the emergency room. By the time she arrives home, Gerry’s ex-girlfriend has left, so Helen has no idea about the affair. In the second reality, Helen leaves, goes to a pub to drink herself into oblivion, and runs into James. This Helen spends the rest of the movie reinventing herself.
The movie makes you think about the idea that your life could be completely different based on a single circumstance. I watched it with my best friend Stephanie, and as it got close to the end, we wondered how the realities were going to come back together. About an hour and a half into the film, only ten minutes before the end, we found out…and when I tell you both of us audibly gasped…. The last ten minutes were tense.
If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it. If you have seen it, why not watch it again? (I did while I wrote this. 🤷🏻♀️)
I’ve always believed that everything happens for a reason, but I feel like we all wonder sometimes how life would have been different…if only. If only I had made this choice instead of that one, life would have turned out differently. But is second-guessing our decisions really worth it? This is where I find the value of those Sliding Doors moments.
If I had chosen a different college, I wouldn’t have even met Stephanie. If I had taken the job at a newspaper after graduation, my career path would have been very different (The Best Laid Plans….). If I hadn’t randomly gone into a chat room one evening, I never would have met Dennis and had Corinne.
In fact, just before Dennis and I met, I remember telling my mom that I had been watching television in bed one evening, surrounded by my cats, and wondered if I really wanted a guy to come in and disrupt the nice quiet life I had. Dennis and I started talking shortly after that. And if I hadn’t married Dennis, I wouldn’t have the large extended family I have, including an amazing bonus daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. And I wouldn’t be listening to my brother-in-law’s infectious laughter as I write this. 🤭🤭🤭
I finished the latest Amanda Prowse novel recently in which the main character battles with herself over the life she’s chosen versus the life she might have had if she had chosen another path. “It happened this way sometimes when glimpses of a life that could have been hers caught her off guard. A Sliding Doors moment….”
“Remember what the Monty Python boys say…. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” (If you know, you know. 😉)
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
5 Stars for This One Life by Amanda Prowse
364 pages
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Publication Date: January 7, 2025
Purchased on Amazon.
Publisher’s Description
She wants it all. But life has other plans…
After years of hard work, Madeleine’s life is very nearly perfect. She’s about to move to LA to pursue her dream job―and there’s a new man on the scene too. But when her mother falls ill, pulling her back to the world she’s tried so hard to leave behind, the repercussions of a life-changing decision Madeleine made seven years ago resurface, threatening to jeopardise everything she’s worked for.
Faced with the promise of her new life, and the pull of her old, she has to ask herself some tough questions: was what she did then right for her family? How do you know when it’s okay to put yourself first? And what’s the cost of happiness?
************
Main Characters:
- Madeleine – 29 years old, a commercial designer in the U.K., lives in a more upscale area to where she grew up, preparing to leave for Los Angeles in two weeks to work with her former boss and eventually start her own company
- Nico – recently met Madeleine in a business meeting and wants to spend as much time getting to know her as possible, despite the fact that she’s moving
- Marnie – Madeleine’s mother, still lives in the less-than-upscale Brenton Park where Madeleine grew up and has always wanted to escape
- Doug – Madeleine’s father, sells at a local market
- Trina – Madeleine’s best friend, they had a falling out years ago and have not quite made their way back to forgiveness, works in data administration at a bank
- Jimmy – Madeleine and Trina’s friend in school, Trina has always had a crush on him, has his own business as a woodworker
- Edith – 🤗
I always look forward to the latest (and greatest) Amanda Prowse novel, and her most recent addition to my bookshelf and Kindle library is no exception.
Told in alternating timelines in the current day and seven years prior, Madeleine’s story unfolds in classic Prowse fashion. We get tidbits of Madeleine’s past interspersed with the present day, slowly learning how she got to where she is, why she made the choices she did, and how she felt about them then and now.
Raised in the not-so-wealthy Brenton Park, Madeleine wants what she see as a better life than the one her parents live. Her desire for independence, success, and wealth drive her to be ambitious to a fault. Her former boss and mentor taught her how to show she belongs. She practices pronouncing restaurant menu items prior to a date to ensure that she sounds confident. Well on her way to achieving everything she wants, Madeleine even meets a new love interest in Nico. He knows she’s moving from the U.K. to the U.S. in a couple of weeks but wants to get to know her anyway. There’s a spark there that they both feel needs to be explored.
When her therapist asks her if she’s happy, she replies, “I have the career of my dreams, a penthouse apartment in Clerkenwell, money in the bank, a travel budget bigger than most people’s mortgages, a twenty-five inch waist, pert boobs, private gym membership, interest from any number of eligible men…And I’m on first-name terms with the best aesthetician in the city. How can I not be happy?” But we see the cracks in her confidence when she begins to cry.
When her mother has a heart attack, she finds herself pulled back into their circle and her past. She spends more time with her family while her mother is ill, and it’s the first time in a while that she has been so involved with them. And knowing she’s leaving soon, Madeleine still feels the guilt of decisions she made in her past to achieve her goals. She wants to leave, but suddenly her choices don’t seem so cut and dry.
Prowse excels at writing characters with robust back stories—even characters you love to hate. As I tell my daughter when she complains about a movie or television character she doesn’t like, you’re not supposed to like them. I really disliked Madeleine at the beginning, and it didn’t have anything to do with her life choices. She seems selfish and uncaring and more than a little disingenuous. I felt about Madeleine the way I think Trina feels about Madeleine.
When Madeleine discovers the half-wall in her apartment painted the wrong color, she calls her decorator to complain because she expected “the palest cream with the vaguest hint of vanilla” and what she saw was “something closer to popcorn—cream with base notes of ochre.” But her decorator thinks she’s calling about the scratch in her designer refrigerator. “It was ugly, brutal and it destroyed the flawless design of this iconic piece of furniture that was the feature of her kitchen…. How could she fix it? How could she sleep? This imperfection was enough to put a splinter in her dreams, so strong was her drive for perfection when it came to such matters.” You get the idea.
But as the story unfolded, my take on Madeleine shifted bit by bit. I won’t say I loved her, but the ending definitely won me over. And the epilogue…perfection. 💋
The message in This One Life feels like the idea that life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans. And Marnie, more than anyone, brings this message home.
- “That’s the thing about life, my love—no matter how much you want everything to be neatly boxed and labelled, it isn’t. It can’t be. Because much of it is dealing with humans, and we are complicated and unpredictable and spontaneous and all the other things that make us wonderful!”
- “I’ve always said people don’t need diamonds and steak, none of us do—we need love, attention, a cuddle at the end of the day, someone to talk to and a place to be—a safe haven. It’s knowing there’s someone at home who worries about you, who thinks about it. It gives you purpose.”
- “…No one gets the life they think they will or the life they think they deserve. Every single one of us has to compromise and sidestep the cracks and jump over the lava and cling on the best we can because that is just life and you are no different.”
This is a beautiful story about the choices we make in this one life that each of us has and makes us question whether they define us forever. 💜
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