Although Jo does imperil her marriage, I never got a true sense of her yearning for her past. Sure she talked about what happened to her and what went before, but that time seems nostalgic not longed for. When she meets up with Eli from the house, she is curious about him and how he’d changed into the person he is now. She yearns for what might have been then, not what actually was then.

I had a feeling that Eli killed Dana from the very beginning. Why else would he be coming into things and what other revelation could shake things off kilter so much? I do see how the admission of temptation can be a relationship wrecker. Daniel was hurt more by her wanting to sleep with Eli than he might have been if she actually had. He said that it took his confession of the murder of her old friend to keep Jo from doing it.

The 3 girls were interesting though. Jo bringing the police into things after Eli’s confession alienated the one daughter that had any remaining closeness to her mother. Eli’s wife is one of the daughter’s most admired professors and after Jo’s revelation, the wife no longer wants to work with the daughter on a special project that counts as two credits for the daughter. It would have been interesting to see how the relationship could have been saved…both relationships actually.

In the end, the police can’t prove Jo’s accusation after Eli denies it saying that she accused him only because he rebuffed her advances (men’s egos can be so fragile they will do anything to protect them). Daniel is hurt for a while & they spend some time apart (he to a conference, she to help her ailing mother). When he picks her up at Logan, they fall back into the rhythm of their lives.

One thing that one of the other daughters said struck me as true; it’s easy for things to be hard. A hard life is sometimes a cop-out because the person didn’t have strength to find happiness. Having a happy life if work sometimes.

Recommended by MIL, it had philosophical qeustions about truth and honesty and justice that made me really sit and think, but as far as an enjoyable read, it was not one of my favorites. This is a book that makes me wish I belonged to a book club because I would love to discuss some of the themes with others and see how differently different people view the same events and choices we make. ( )

This is a book that badly needed editing. A really long set up for a pretty good short story. ( )

This story of a wife and mother suddenly revisiting her past had great moments and held my attention. Still it had long, boring passages.

I found the protagonist annoying and self-indulgent in a way that didn't jibe at all with the way she thought of herself. Further, her inability to see it, even in the end left me unsatisfied.

At points, her descriptions and observations, while interesting and well drawn, dragged on. Her focus on minutia rang untrue to me, her description of her marriage and her husband was so perfect, that it made what followed wholly unbelievable.

In fact, all the male characters in this book, from her husband, to Eli, to the other men in "the house" felt more like a woman's fantasy of what a man is than anyone I've actually known.

Not a bad pick if you're willing to have a quick read, nostalgic for the 60s, and willing to not think too much. ( )

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Over the past year or so I’ve lost count of the number of fellow readers who have written about the pleasure they have had from the books of Sue Miller and I’ve finally been forced by the sheer weight of opinion to beg the library to find me a copy of at least one of her books. Librarians, if you’re reading this. be warned, you are going to have to go out and find me her entire back catalogue because I am now definitely one of the converted.
Mind you, I opened While I Was Gone with a certain amount of trepidation. Two of the quotes on the back of my copy likened Miller to an American Joanna Trollope and while I have nothing against Trollope as a beach read, I wouldn’t think of her as a great stylist, as the sort of writer to whom I would feel the need to return as a pressing force in my reading life. My fellow bloggers clearly did think of Miller in this light. Who was right?
Well, I’m glad, if not surprised, to say that the bloggers are. Miller may explore the same sort of domestic canvas as Trollope, but she is a far better writer and a far more precise and delicate observer of human nature than her British counterpart. While I Was Gone is the story of Jo Becker, an established member of her small community, the local vet and wife of one of the local pastors. Jo has reached a turning point in her life. Her three children have left home and she finds herself feeling somehow disassociated from all that has gone before, as if the life that she has lived has passed and she has now to go forward and find some sort of new life, almost a new personna. Jo, however, is wrong. Into her life comes an old acquaintance, Eli Mayhew, a house-mate from her early twenties, a period in her life when Jo was also striving to understand who she was and what she wanted, a time, ultimately, of great tragedy. Eli’s reappearance forces Jo to recognise that in fact it isn’t possible to disassociate herself from who she has been and the ‘baggage’ that she inevitably brings with her. The emotions that her situation reawaken in Jo threaten her relationship with her husband, Daniel, and with her three daughters, especially the youngest, Sadie, and she has to recognise that she cannot isolate herself from others, expecting them to accept life as she re-writes it despite the implications it may have for them and their lives.
This book is a superb exploration of the way in which we place ourselves at the centre of the world and forget that our every action has consequences that others may read in a very different way to ourselves, because we are not the centre of the world as they see it. Having said that, Jo never comes over as a selfish, ego-centric monster, In fact, quite the contrary. She comes over as a human being, the same as each and every one of us. In reading about Jo, we could be reading about ourselves. This is a book about the human condition.
According to my copy there are at least five more Miller novels out there and as this was written in 1999 I can only hope that there have been others published since. Miller is going to the very top of ‘must be read’ list.