One True Thing » (Reprint)

Anna Quindlen is the author of five previous bestselling novels (Rise and Shine, Blessings, Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue), and seven nonfiction books (A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Good Dog. Stay., Being Perfect, Loud & Clear, Living Out Loud, Thinking Out Loud, and How Reading Changed My Life). Her New York Times column "Public and Private" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. From 2000-2009, She wrote the "Last Word" column for Newsweek.

A mother.  A daughter.  A shattering choice.

From Anna Quindlen, bestselling author of Black and Blue, comes a novel of life, love and everyday acts of mercy.

"A triumph."
--San Francisco Chronicle

From the Paperback edition.

BookList

Considering her Pulitzer Prize-winning op-ed columns for the New York Times (collected in the invigorating Thinking Out Loud ), it's no surprise that Quindlen's fiction has a strong moral component. The question posed in this tilt-a-world tale of self-sacrifice, grief, suspense, and revelation is whether or not a person has the right to die. And, further, how on earth can a person convince themselves to end the life of a loved one, no matter how awful their suffering?

The novel begins with a deceptively hubristic prologue in which our narrator, 24-year-old Ellen Gulden, describes what it's like to be in jail charged with killing her dying mother. Then we get the real story, every painful, ironic bit of it. Fresh out of Harvard and eager to prove herself as a journalist, Ellen is completely unprepared for her rather elusive and dismissive father's request that she move back home and nurse her mother, who, at age 46, has suddenly become terribly ill. Ellen has always been a daddy's girl, dismissing her homespun mother as an anachronism. Now, as she enters her mother's world just as her mother is about to exit it, everything she's ever assumed about her family and, indeed, life itself is challenged.

It isn't easy reading about how cancer ravages Ellen's once radiant and ever-nurturing mother, but it is eminently satisfying to witness Ellen's transformation from an often glib, emotionally suppressed overachiever into a woman who begins to fathom the meaning of love. Quindlen also gets in some good jabs at the media for its feverish appetite for easy scandal and its irrelevance to the truth manifest in genuine tragedies. -- Booklist