Isabel Gillies

It's hard not to fall in love with this memoir of exile from one's transplanted hometown to rebuild an acting career post-divorce with two young boys in tow. Isabel Gillies returns to New York and the LAW AND ORDER soundstage shell-shocked from her husband's announcement that he is in love with a colleague. While the time is emotionally difficult, the tale is suffused with the love and support of her parents. On some level, it is this parental love story for her parents that carries the show more narrative forward. (A bit of outside research reveals that her parents were no slouches -- both held prestigious positions in not-for-profit organizations prior to retirement.) It is because the book is so full of love -- parent to child to grandchild -- that the author's sudden and delightful discovery of new romantic love feels almost meant to be. Recommended. (72) show less

I've always felt that as the days begin to darken we get into the cozy time of year. But just what is meant by cozy? Gillies excellently articulates the myriad ways people can find to make ourselves cozy and why it is important. As she describes all the things she finds to be cozy, you are urged to do the same. She takes the Art of Being Cozy to a whole new level of self-care. This got me thinking: when I am sick I intuitively make myself cozy--a blanket, a cup of tea.

Cozy is self care, show more which is different for everyone. It's how you feel most secure.

I thoroughly enjoyed this not just for the topic but for Gillies as a writer. I love how she invites us into her world and is so unabashedly herself. I loved her writing style: engaging, intimate, sometimes even funny and sweet.

A further note: as someone with multiple anxiety disorders including CPTSD, I have found this to be a helpful form of treatment--of finding ways to seek calm throughout your day (Gillies says to "find your anchor"). Which is also a way of centering the self. show less

As it turns out, I liked this book and the author much more at the beginning of her story than I did by then end. By the end I felt manipulated by her and the way she told her story. Although she admits that there were red flags she should have seen, she still felt completely blindsided when her husband announced he "couldn't do this anymore". She not only chose to ignore all signs that he was involved with the new professor, but she willfully threw them together. I found it less and less show more believable that she was so completely in love with Oberlin, Ohio, although it may see quite bucolic in retrospect.

She paints herself as a woman left with no choices, but I just don't buy that. She had a teaching job at the college that she seemed to enjoy. She and her husband both came from enormously privileged backgrounds. If she had wanted to remain in Ohio so that her 3 year old and 18 month old would have a chance to be with their father more frequently, I feel certain she could have done it. Instead she moved back in with her parents in their Central Park West flat, even though they had retired and wanted to move to Florida. I think she wanted to return to New York and hopefully her acting career and old friends and new opportunities rather than get hay in her hair in Ohio. Ultimately I found her to be self-centered and manipulative. Sorry, Isabel. show less

http://tammydotts.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/review-a-year-and-six-seconds/

When her marriage ends, Isabel Gillies finds herself and her two young sons back in New York, living with her parents. Her memoir, A Year and Six Seconds: A Love Story, recounts her struggles to put the pieces of their lives if not back together again, at least together enough to take on a new shape.

Gillies’ voice is that of a close friend, and the memoir reads as if the reader and Gillies were catching up over a cup show more of coffee. The tone is engaging. Memoirs can often read as if the author is dumping all her dirty laundry onto the page for readers to revel in and for the author to take pride in. Although there’s something to be said for the “no shame” approach, Gillies takes a different tack.

She retells the initial days of moving back to the family home with the right mix of full disclosure and privacy. She cops to feelings of embarrassment about living with her parents and how it affects their lives, but doesn’t dwell too much on it. This is not a “woe is me” memoir. Gillies never panders to her readers, offering clichéd advice about surviving divorce or jumping into the dating pool again.

Instead, Gillies matter-of-factly describes the events of the year after her marriage ended, without excessive hand wringing or wallowing. She doesn’t whitewash events either. She’s the first to admit when she’s incapable of rising above feelings of jealousy, anger and complete sorrow. The emotions of the past are still fresh in her mind, but the perspective of time lets Gillies write about them with a slight sense of distance.

What comes through most of all is her love for her two sons. The move from a suburban college town in Ohio to Manhattan couldn’t have been easy for the family. But Gillies and her parents make the most of it for the boys. Whether it’s turning getting dressed in winter gear into a game with waiting chairs or finding the perfect nanny through Craigslist, Gillies writes with honesty about single motherhood. She has a strong support system and acknowledges it as helping get her through the year.

Details of the marriage’s end are left to Gillies' previous book, Happens Every Day: An All-True Story. A Year and Six Seconds spends its time looking at how divorcing parents try to remain a family across state lines and how Gillies is able to accept that reconciliation is out of the question and she wouldn’t want it anyway.

The six seconds of the title refers something a friend told Gillies – it takes six seconds to fall in love. As she explains, six-second love isn’t “a fleeting through about how someone is hot, and I’m not talking about a crush; I’m talking about knowing with certainty that you could spend your life with this person. In an instant, not only are you down the aisle, but you have had the babies, you have reached old age, and you are buried side by side under a tree for all eternity. In six seconds, you see it all. And you feel it; you feel the love that will make your whole life shift. Six-second love is real, but it doesn’t always get you to happily ever after.”

Gillies gets a second chance at six-second love toward the end of the memoir, about a year chronologically after her first marriage ends. This isn’t a spoiler: Gillies tells readers up front that there’s a second love in her life. But the memoir doesn’t follow Gillies on madcap adventures in dating. She talks about her first post-marriage kiss (a true New York moment) and some of the dates she went on, but they’re not important to who she is now and Gillies rightly leaves details out of the memoir. Some readers may want more from the book in this regard, but the love story of the subtitle is really about Gillies’ love for her sons and (as corny as it can sound) for herself.

If the memoir had ended before Gillies' second marriage or even before she met her husband, you have the feeling she and the boys were going to be okay. And you look forward to the next time you can get together over coffee. show less