Books We Like

NPR.org; March 17, 2009

by Maureen Corrigan

I swear to you, this really happened: Two weeks ago, I was sitting around on a Saturday night, just me and the dog. I didn't feel like reading any of the books I was supposed to be reading, so I began rooting through my pile of new review books. One slim volume caught my eye, initially, because of its title: Happens Every Day, a memoir by Isabel Gillies. "What happens every day?" I wondered. And, so I started reading. I couldn't put the book down and by the time my husband came home late that night from a business trip, I'd finished it. I grunted, "Welcome home," and went up to bed, drained.
The next morning over breakfast, my husband looked up from the newspapers and announced, "I finished a whole book last night."
"So did I!" I said. You see the punch line coming: He'd picked up Gillies' memoir from the table where I'd left it and he couldn't put it down either.
Maybe it's a bit ominous that we both were transfixed by this account of a marriage abruptly falling apart, although certainly we bonded all that morning by trying to figure out why Gillies' memoir is so disarming, especially given that she's not a writer. But therein lies her charm. When Gillies, for instance, starts reminiscing about the restored Victorian house she and her husband and her two little boys lived in in Ohio and then just gives up after a few sentences and says: "I will never be able to write how great it was," you smile. You're on her side.
That amateurish snort of frustration with words not only gives Gillies' story the ring of truth, but it also ironically conveys what a polished description might not: that this was one fantastic house! Similarly, as Gillies tackles her main subject — the sudden disintegration of her marriage — you feel, as a reader, as though you're sitting with a good friend over a pitcher of margaritas, listening to her, tearfully, digressively, even ditzily describe how her husband — whom she knew since they were both children spending summers on an island in Maine — turned into a pod person practically overnight. I'll fess up to the fact that Gillies' beauty — she was on the cover of Seventeen Magazine, and she had a couple of dates with Mick Jagger — adds a pinch of schadenfreude here for the rest of us mortals. Even beautiful people get dumped! And, it's a double bonus that this whole sad story takes place within the fenced-in groves of academe and that Gillies then-husband is a professor poet (think "Heathcliff with an earring," she tells us). It's always fascinating to read about academics acting on their ids rather than their intellects.
The gist of Gillies' tale is this: her husband, whom she calls here by the pseudonym "Josiah," wins the academic jackpot: a tenured teaching position at Oberlin College. (Gillies, by the way, offers very funny, outsider takes on the preciousness of artsy colleges like Oberlin, describing it as a school where all the students "play an instrument well" and "know how to address [transgendered people].") Gillies gave up her acting job in New York and the young family decamped to Ohio where, after a year, they bought that great house. Within one month of moving in, Josiah fell head over heels for a woman Gillies calls "Sylvia," the "new hire" in his department, a half-French, Audrey Hepburn look-alike whom Gillies had befriended. Another entrancing aspect of this painful story, as Gillies tells it, is that Josiah refuses to discuss his obvious infatuation with Sylvia. This is a man who's a poet, whose brilliant mind one friend likened to "a cathedral" and, yet, in this crucial situation where his marriage and family are at stake, he acts like 90 percent of the guys out there and won't talk about his feelings. Gillies, of course, desperately wants a story to explain why her life is upended. Finally, months after they separate, he calls Gillies and announces that he and Sylvia are, indeed, a couple.
I know we're only getting one side of the break-up here, but unless she's a much more manipulative writer than I'm giving her credit for, Gillies comes off as a genuinely peppy, uncomplicated woman. She even admits that she doesn't "really like poetry . . . [because she] just [doesn't] get it," which, obviously, might have created problems with Josiah the bard. For those readers who've endured similar seismic shifts of the heart, Happens Every Day will offer the comfort of solidarity. For the rest of us who've been, so far, spared, it makes for compulsive and, frankly, chilling late-night reading.

Acclaimed breakup memoir a love letter to Oberlin
The Chronicle-Telegram; March 29, 2009
Cindy Leise 
OBERLIN — A newly published memoir by Isabel Gillies, who plays the wife of lead Detective Elliot Stabler on NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” is a love poem to Oberlin — in the saddest of ways. You can feel her delight as Gillies — a tall, blond, New York City WASP who once graced the cover of Seventeen magazine and dated Mick Jagger — moves to Oberlin in 2004. Her handsome, brilliant husband, who previously taught at Harvard University, has snared a tenured poetry job in the English department of Oberlin College. By the next fall, they have settled in with their two boys, ages 1 and 3. They renovate a big 1877 brick house on Elm Street that they nickname “Bricky,” and Gillies starts her own job as an adjunct professor of acting. But five weeks after moving into their dream home, her husband dumps her for a married female professor who comes to Oberlin to teach 18th-century English literature. Gillies, who had befriended the woman, is dumfounded. The blood-letting begins.
There’s weeping, cajoling, spying and attempts to confirm the presumed affair. Gillies confronts her competition — whom she describes alternately as similar to Audrey Hepburn, Winona Rider or Natalie Portman. After returning home, she discovers her husband has learned about the confrontation and is furious. The entire breakup — from start to finish — occurs between October and December, at the time the nation was consumed with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Their own household was torn apart, Gillies writes, but “(t)his mess we had made ourselves.” Gillies’ “Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story” was published Tuesday by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc. The tale — which uses aliases for her ex and the professor he eventually married — is a featured selection at 7,000 Starbucks nationwide. Gillies, 39, calls her book a story of “loving your life even when it’s falling apart.”
Getting good reviews
-O, The Oprah Magazine called Gillies’ book “a smart, rueful memoir of love, betrayal, and survival.”
-David Auburn, Pulitzer Prize-wining author of “Proof,” wrote that Gillies “tells the story of the breakup of her ‘perfect’ marriage with astonishing honesty, sharp humor, and not a shred of self-pity. This is a memoir that reads like a gripping mystery and a moving coming-of-age tale.”
-Library Journal called the book “the nonfiction equivalent of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn … Highly recommended.”
Gillies was featured Wednesday on “The Today Show.”
-Vogue featured her writing in the Up Front feature in its February issue and Glamour called her book a “must read for March.”
-Gossipy, direct and full of mentions of Lorain County, the 261 pages can be devoured in a night.
‘Taking the Reader with Me’
In a telephone interview with The Chronicle-Telegram, Gillies said her sudden breakup was crushing, and she felt compelled to write about it. She said she has already gotten feedback from women whose husbands have left them, and she hopes they can find solace in the book. “It’s easy to be taken under by it,” Gillies said. All the hoopla about the book is “a little overwhelming,” she said. Any kind of artistic process is cathartic, but that’s not why she wrote the memoir, she said. Instead, it was probably her friends who urged her on, saying she wrote great e-mails and the topic was compelling. She began writing at the New York Society Library and discovered she liked doing it. “It kind of reads like a whodunit,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened, and I’m taking the reader with me.” While she has many fond memories of Oberlin, she said it was important to leave as soon as possible following the breakup. “I found the anger was really paralyzing,” she said. But Gillies has moved on, and she seems delighted with where life has taken her. Since October 2007, she has been married to Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Lattman, whom she describes in the book as “the love of my life.” They are raising her two sons and his daughter, and Gillies is working on another book. The key to happiness is “getting with the program about what’s going on with your life,” she said. “If your kids are healthy and you are healthy and things are all good, then it’s greedy to do anything else than try to stay positive about where you are,” she said.

'Happens Every Day' memoir puts Oberlin on the infidelity map

Cleveland.com; March 29, 2009
Karen R. Long

Five years ago, when Manhattan actress Isabel Gillies landed in Oberlin, she hit upon selling $10 bunches of wildflowers at the farmers market as a way to meet people and introduce herself.
She has everyone's attention now.
"Happens Every Day" is Gillies' new memoir about living in one of Oberlin's grandest brick homes, married to the handsomest professor - "He was Heathcliff with an earring" - only to have him unceremoniously dump her and their toddler sons for the new instructor in 18th-century English literature.
Starbucks has singled out Gillies' book to promote in its 7,000 stores, praising it as a story about "loving your life even when it's falling apart." Georgetown University critic Maureen Corrigan gave it a rave on National Public Radio, saying first she, then her husband, consumed it in a single sitting.
And Gillies, who plays a small recurring part on "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" as Lt. Stabler's wife, scored four coveted minutes of national airtime Wednesday on the "Today" show, where she described her writing debut, started on her BlackBerry.
"Suddenly, it's the talk of the town," said Tom Oates, assistant manager of the Oberlin College bookstore. "They're selling very quickly."
Gillies, 39, has written a chatty, slightly goofy roman à clef, with the keys left under the mat for pretty much anyone living in Oberlin. She gives her ex-husband the name of Josiah Robinson on these pages, gushing that he "was like Indiana Jones. I always imagined that his students (male and female) might write 'I love you' on their eyelids and bat them at him during his class."
He is, in actuality, Oberlin's poetry professor, DeSales Harrison. Asked if he had read "Happens Every Day," in which he berates Gillies for a mess of Cheerios left under their boys' car seats, Harrison politely and promptly e-mailed, "I would love to help you with your story, but I have found that the best policy is to refrain from commenting. I hope you understand."
Gillies, who at age 14 posed on the cover of Seventeen magazine and says she twice dated Mick Jagger, describes herself, her ex and his new wife as all friends now.
"I always felt so insecure out there because I felt like the blond actress chick who was dragged along to the party by my smarty-pants husband," she said in a telephone interview from Manhattan. "But I was pretty. And I could be funny. . . And then I married a very, very smart person -- and I was surrounded by people with all these advanced degrees so I'd fall into this blond shtick."
Little DeSales and young Isabel sailed together as children near their families' summer homes in Maine; their adult romance ignited at his sister's wedding. They married, and moved to Oberlin with two cherubic, tow-headed boys, in time for Gillies to campaign for John Kerry.
The family sparked interest when it spent more than $300,000 for a stately house on Elm Street, a steal to the couple -- "we were both pretty big WASPs" -- but much more money than college regulars could remember a new English professor affording.
"We didn't just stay in our cushy, too expensive New York life with our friends, we went out like Earnest Shackleton on the Endurance and forged new territory," Gillies writes of moving to Ohio. "I was proud of us."
She did weep, however, because her sons seemed doomed to becoming Midwesterners, but perked up when she met the newly hired English instructor, "Sylvia" in print, but professor Laura Baudot in person.
"She wore all sorts of great designer clothes, which again I appreciated," Gillies writes. "In New York everybody looks great and is well dressed, but seeing someone in Ohio wearing Marc Jacobs is like spotting an owl in Central Park. Rare."
Gillies writes that her new buddy came up with the title of her memoir. On page 177, the author describes fearfully whispering her disbelief that a man might abandon his perfect little sons. "And then in her half-French accent Sylvia said the most dumbfounding thing, 'It happens every day.' "
No other woman reacted so coldly, Gillies writes. Baudot did not respond to requests for her side of the story.
Eventually, Baudot and Harrison married. Gillies moved back to New York and married a Wall Street Journal reporter. The boys are now age 7 and 4. Their mother said she doesn't expect them to read "Happens Every Day" now, but that openness is one of her signature traits.
"I've put my emotions, raw, out there, for national television," Gillies said. "I don't think this is so different. I don't think any one would bat an eye if I wrote a song."
She is not, however, planning a reading in Oberlin.

Idyllic marriage is torn asunder
Former 'Law & Order' actress details its painful collapse in Oberlin setting
By Scott Eyman
Cox Newspapers; May 10, 2009
Isabel Gillies walked away from her job as an actress on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to move to Oberlin and be a faculty wife.
Her husband was a poetry professor, they had two sons, and she was crazy in love with her family and the idea of raising her kids in a stress-free environment.
Gillies and her husband bought a house, installed new appliances and a new heating system. She didn't miss New York, and loved her new home, for Oberlin has a vibe all its own. It's farmland, with plenty of the spectacular cloud formations of the Midwest, what the natives call ''God light,'' when the sun streams through, providing some spectacular lighting effects.
And then there are the people. ''Oberlin students are named Zack or Violet,'' Gillies writes. ''They know transgendered people and how to address them, never making a mistake. I am forever getting confused on that account. Sometimes it is very hard to tell what gender these kids are, and I supposed that is the point.''
Gillies and her husband fit right in. Once, a few generations ago, their respective families had some money, but now they're down to their last Maine vacation house. They know fine things, but don't have a lot of them.
A month after establishing an idyllic existence, Gillies' husband dumps his family for a new member of the faculty, a professor of 18th-century English literature. The Other Woman — Gillies calls her Sylvia and her husband Josiah, even though those aren't their names, and a few minutes on Google will turn up the real ones — has looks somewhere between Audrey Hepburn and Winona Ryder, and a vaguely French accent. She's diametrically opposite Gillies, who is blond and Nordic.
''Happens every day,'' is what the other woman tells Gillies when the soon-to-be ex-wife asks how this could be happening to her. True, but it doesn't happen every day to Isabel Gillies, and Happens Every Day is her story of her marriage and unwanted divorce.
Gillies' book got me thinking about a batch of divorces I've been in proximity to the last several years. (Have you noticed that divorces, like death, often come in bunches?) They all began with affairs that nobody would admit existed; none of the betrayed spouses ever saw it coming; all went through emotional ravages, including a period of bouncing-off-the-walls craziness, accompanied by the well-known divorce weight-loss program.
Oh, one other thing: The adulterous spouse always tries to justify his or her behavior, which only proves that very few people will cop to being the incompetent architects of their own life.
In the end, everybody survives, but at a cost I can only imagine, and there tends to be a certain residual bitterness at the bottom of the cup.
Gillies' experience was very similar. She develops an interest in reality TV and a heretofore unexpected sympathy for Jennifer Aniston. And she cunningly compares her ravaged life with two small children to the life of people in the movies who are having the same experience.
''In the movies, when husbands or wives suddenly announce that they are leaving the marriage, life seems to stop suddenly to make room . . . The jilted woman or man has endless time to wallow in bed for days crying or drinking. That actress never gets out of her nightgown, except to take long meaningful walks through Central Park. I needed to be in that movie.''
So what makes Happens Every Day worth reading?
Gillies is an actress by profession, and actors are trained to be specific, so she's got a great eye. She's also a good writer:
''I went upstairs to where the boys were sleeping in their rooms and sat in the hallway equidistant between them. I took in a long steady deep breath and when I couldn't take in any more, I held it. I think I held my breath for the next two months.''
Gillies book is not a diatribe, and only occasionally a cri de couer. Mainly, it's a surgical reconstruction of her marriage's sudden collapse, and it's utterly honest and painful. Despite the fact that her predominant state throughout the book is pain, Gillies is pretty good company, mainly because she's got a good sense of humor, although not about Sylvia.
It's a tart book, a universal book, which is to say completely human, and eminently worth reading for both men and women.

A Must-Read and its Lesson in Letting Go

Gina LeVeque

Columbia Catholic Examiner; May 24, 2009
Last week, I finished a book, and have not been able to stop thinking about it.  The title is Happens Every Day, and to be honest, not since devouring a copy of Judy Blume’s Forever in one sitting when I was thirteen years old have I been so consumed with a book as I have with Isabel Gillies’ memoir about the disintegration of her marriage.   
Her story is transfixing from the start.  She describes falling in love with her husband, a handsome, intense academic whom she met when they were both children spending their summers in Maine.  They fall in love, get married, and then Gillies leaves her acting job in the role of Detective Stabler’s wife on Law & Order SVU to move to Ohio when her husband gets a teaching position as a poetry professor at Oberlin College.  From the outside, Gillies is a woman who appears to have it all: She’s beautiful, (Gillies was a Seventeen Magazine cover girl and went out with Mick Jagger a few times) madly in love with her husband, has two little boys whom she adores and has recently moved into her dream house which she lovingly decorates with William Morris wallpaper and builds a window seat in the kitchen.  Everything seems to be going “according to plan,” that is, until her husband’s English department hires a new literature professor, a woman described as part Winona Ryder part Audrey Hepburn.  Within one month, her husband has fallen head over heels in love for this colleague.  Happens Every Day is Isabel Gillies’ brutally honest account of how it all unfolded.  
The author is not a writer in the traditional sense, but she definitely has the gift of conversation in spades, and that’s what this book is. Reading it feels like an intimate conversation with a close friend who is confiding in you about her confusion, sadness, anxiety and heartbreak.  As her marriage is crumbling, the author tries desperately to make her husband NOT leave her.  She makes up excuses to see him at the office, adjusts her daily routine so as to “accidently” run into him, and cajoles him into spending more time with her.  It’s no use, and painful to read, as her husband is already emotionally checked out. 
Many people; consciously or unconsciously have a plan of how life is supposed to turn out.  The author is no exception, and in part, this fuels her initial resistance to letting go.  Without question, experiencing her husband leaving her for another woman was not part of the plan.  However, once she does let go, she joyfully makes the discovery that God has another, better plan up His sleeve.  For Catholics, St. Francis personifies the grace of being able to let go.  He fully embraced a spirit of detachment in the belief that in this way, he was freer to devote himself entirely to God.  In the struggle to let go, we must remember the words of Jesus that with God all things are possible.  Like Gillies, there comes a time in everyone’s life when we are faced with the challenge of letting go.  This is so difficult, but we have to ask ourselves, “What am I holding onto that is holding me back and perhaps keeping me from realizing God’s true plan for my life?”   
Meeting the challenge to let go ultimately opens the way for God’s promises to be fulfilled.  Anyone struggling with this can find inspiration in Gillies’ tale.  Resolving to “pull up her socks,” take the high road and just put one foot in front of the other, she emerges on the other side, stronger, more at peace and with her spirit, her dignity and her sense of humor fully intact.  And like St. Francis, she is also more free.