Story for the Week
When I was in high school, I was convinced that I was going to be the next Mike Royko, who was a well-known newspaper columnist in Chicago. I have always enjoyed writing. If I wasn’t reading, I was writing angst-filled, teenage poetry (“my life is like a circle, spinning round and round and round”).
I joined the newspaper staff my freshman year of high school and didn’t stop my obsession with print journalism all the way through college. I loved everything about it—the all-nighters pushing through deadline, the precision of the paste-up, the smell of the newsprint when the fresh papers were delivered. In college, if it was deadline, I was in the journalism lab and all of my professors knew it.
I still have the Schaedler Rules we had to buy freshman year. My daughter thinks they’re cool because they’re transparent and flexible. I warn her to be careful with them because they’re expensive and more than 30 years old. (For those of you asking who on earth keeps rulers for 30+ years, check them out. They are considered the most precise rulers in the world.)
After graduation, I interviewed with a small, local newspaper. The editor asked me to write a couple of articles as a trial run. When I went back, he apologized and told me that the owner wanted me to write a couple more before making a decision. He clearly wasn’t happy at his job because he told me that he was hoping that I had a great offer somewhere else. When I told him I did have an offer, he told me to take it and run. I did.
That move, believe it or not, started my career on the trajectory to working in human resources. I started working as a proofreader for a typesetting company. Then I was hired as a proofreader for a consulting firm, where I eventually became the document production manager. I moved to another consulting firm where I got to work as the production manager and proofreader for a magazine—which I LOVED. If I had to choose the favorite job I’ve ever held, that was it. To this day, I remember the smell of the press room. I would literally just inhale as deeply as I could when I walked in the room because I loved the smell of the ink. I still do the same whenever I open a new magazine.
Eventually, the magazine had to shut down production because the firm had to make cuts to survive a recession. It was a great firm, so a year later, I returned in an HR role working in deployment because I would have taken almost any job to go back. I’ve been in deployment ever since, even through an acquisition by the firm I’m with now.
I enjoy deployment, I love my job, and I’m good at it (if I do say so myself). The firm I work for is great, and leadership really is invested in taking care of employees. I feel valued and appreciated, which I know is more than a lot of people can say about where they work.
“The next Mike Royko” fell by the wayside a long, long time ago. Life happens. Sometimes what our hearts are set on just doesn’t make sense, so we make other choices.
I wanted to be a writer, and life didn’t take me in that direction, so now I get my writing fix here. I thought I would be married in my 20s, and I wanted two boys. I got married when I was 36 and have the most amazing daughter who I wouldn’t trade for anything.
Life happens, and we don’t always get to determine how it happens. We just have to make the most of the life we’re given. I recently finished a book about a couple who have to recreate themselves when life happens to them.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐
3 Stars for With or Without You by Caroline Leavitt
288 pages
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Publication Date: August 4, 2020
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Algonquin Books.
Publisher’s Description
Stella is a nurse who has long suppressed her own needs and desires to nurture the dreams of her partner, Simon, the bass player for a rock band that has started to lose its edge. But when Stella gets unexpectedly ill and falls into a coma just as Simon is preparing to fly with his band to Los Angeles for a gig that could revive his career, Simon must learn the meaning of sacrifice, while Stella’s best friend, Libby, a doctor who treats Stella, must also make a difficult choice as the coma wears on.
When Stella at last awakes from her two-month sleep, she emerges into a striking new reality where Simon and Libby have formed an intense bond, and where she discovers that she has acquired a startling artistic talent of her own: the ability to draw portraits of people in which she captures their innermost feelings and desires. Stella’s whole identity, but also her role in her relationships, has been scrambled, and she has the chance to form a new life, one she hadn’t even realized she wanted.
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I was intrigued by the description of Caroline Leavitt’s With or Without You. I envisioned it as a dramatic version of While You Were Sleeping. In the romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock, Bill Pullman, and Peter Gallagher, the female lead is secretly attracted to a man who gets into an accident and slips into a coma. She goes in the ambulance with him to the hospital and says she is his fiancée so she can stay with him and ends up falling in love with his brother while he’s in the coma.
There are so many story lines that could have been developed in this book and, I think, more quickly, and that’s why I gave it only 3 stars. It’s ok. It could have been worse, but I feel like it could have been so much better.
Stella and Simon have fallen into a routine. Stella wants to settle down and have kids and a home, but her long-time boyfriend Simon still yearns for the thrill of performing. His band has a chance to revive themselves during a weekend gig in LA, and Stella doesn’t want to go. Their desires have diverged over the years, and they end up arguing. No real spoilers here because this is the start of the book; this is what sets off the story.
Stella is battling a cold and takes some cold medicine. She’s drinking wine. Simon wants to throwback to when they first met, when they were more carefree and mellow and offers Stella a pill that he happens to have in his pocket. He tells her that it’s “just” an ADHD med even though he has no idea what it is, and Stella has had too much to drink to know the difference. When Stella doesn’t wake up the next morning, Simon gives up the opportunity with his band to stay at her hospital bedside while she’s in a coma.
***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***
Simon finds himself in a position where he must reinvent himself. He loves Stella (and feels like he’s to blame for her condition), so he has to take care of things—pay the rent, pay the bills, take care of the apartment. He has to find a regular job. Libby, Stella’s best friend and a doctor at the hospital, resents Simon at first because of everything she’s heard about him from Stella. According to the description, Simon and Libby form a deep bond while Stella is in the coma, but we really don’t see that while Stella is actually in the coma, which takes up about 40% of the book. And Simon and Libby don’t actually start a relationship until well after Stella wakes up and is discharged from the hospital.
We also know that Stella awakens with a new talent (a documented scientific possibility with coma patients). She wakes up a very different person. She’s not invested in this “new Simon,” and she finds herself seeking out meaningless sexual encounters with random men. She spends her days drawing random circles and objects around the apartment. It’s not until 60% of the way through the book that she discovers her new talent of being able to see people’s deepest emotions in the pictures she draws of them. When she discovers the truth about Simon and Libby, she runs off, leaving notes for them telling them basically to F off, but it’s really hard to feel bad for her because she didn’t really love Simon anymore, and she cheated (a lot) long before Simon and Libby got together.
I really expected the bulk of the story to focus on the relationship development between Simon and Libby and Stella’s unexpected new talent. I was disappointed that those story lines weren’t developed sooner and more. We spend most of the story seeing Simon sitting at Stella’s bedside and start driving for Uber and becoming a more responsible adult.
I did like the way the story ended. Both Stella and Simon come to terms with life as it is and go their separate ways, and Stella settles into the life she truly wants. The beginning and the end were good, but just like life, a good book is about the journey. This one was honestly kind of boring for me. 😐
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