Lee Woodruff

Maura Corrigan is walking her children to school when her phone vibrates, signaling a new text message. In the instant she spends smiling secretly to herself and beginning to formulate a witty reply, her attention diverted from her children, the unthinkable happens. How Maura, husband Pete, and parents Margaret and Roger deal with this tragedy forms the central theme of this debut novel.

A passage from the book seems to sum it up nicely: Please kept secrets. People built walls. It didn’t show more mean they couldn’t and didn’t love with all their hearts. … Maybe silence was a price we sometimes paid for loving so completely, the price we sometimes paid to protect those we loved most.

This is not a plot-driven novel, it is character-driven, and all these characters are flawed. Margaret is maddeningly controlled and controlling. Charismatic Roger cannot bring himself to face his diminishing skills and takes a mistress to keep himself feeling young. Pete has never outgrown his college-boy drinking. Maura bears the burden of a guilty secret, and cannot bring herself to forgive anyone else, let alone herself.

But flaws notwithstanding, they are an extended family and they love each other. The novel covers just over a year in their lives; as they try to recover from the tragedy, they alternately turn to or reject each other in their grief and distress. The reader can only watch them stumble along, hurting one another, understanding one another, forgiving one another. show less

More Lee Woodruff's story than Bob's, this book is still very much worth the read. There is a bit humor gently mixed with the heartache, angst and ultimate triumph in this tale of a network anchor severely injured by a roadside bomb while embedded with troops in Iraq. It could have been trimmed a little, but it's very well written. No ghost writers needed here!

I anticipated being deeply affected by this book because it centered around the death of a child; however, I never felt connected with the parents or grandparents of this child. Their grief should have been palpable, and it wasn't. Each of the main characters grieved in a self absorption that excluded an understanding of others' grief. The child's mother and grandfather were each involved in extramarital affairs while the child's father existed in an alcoholic haze of self-pity and the show more grandmother silently observed her husband's affair through pursed lips. This is not a book I will remember. show less

I love a book that has such powerful emotional honesty that you just can't help becoming invested in it. CBS This Morning journalist Lee Woodruff's first novel, Those We Love Most, is one of those books.

This is a multigenerational story, about Maura, wife and mom to three young children, and her mother Margaret. A moment of inattention by Maura forever changes their lives, one that will cause her to feel incredible guilt and pain. The tragedy that follows is compounded by the secret of show more betrayal that Maura carries.

Margaret is a rock for her daughter, doing all she can to get her and the family through the aftermath of a beloved child's death. She loves her husband Roger, and when he faces a health crisis, she is also forced to face a secret that he has been hiding from her, one that if she were honest with herself, she already knew.

This is a novel about how hard it is to be married, and the resilience of the human spirit. Margaret describes her life with Roger after many years together:
"The patterns and paths of their life together, especially in the past decade, had become more and more divergent. She had her set schedule: gardening, bridge, exercise, and the occasional lunch with friends. Being a devoted grandmother, a role of which she was immensely proud, also took up a large portion of her time....But Roger spent too much time in the office at his stage in life, in her opinion."
Margaret is a character that many women will relate to: the one who keeps things together, who never falls apart, soldiers through everything.
"Margaret believed it was wife's job to keep the exterior facade spackled and impenetrable, to prevent the cracks from showing on the outside. In her mind, a classy woman never broke rank."

Maura and her husband Pete had their own problems before the tragedy.
"Things had been operating on this half-speed for a while, Maura acknowledged, each of them heading down an easy slipstream in marriage where the valuable, intimate parts begin to erode in a tidal wave of banality."
Woodruff succeeds in bringing these women to life; indeed, they are women you feel that you know in your own life. Her observations about marriage at its different stages will resonate with many women.

The writing is insightful, and the scenes at the hospital will break your heart. It is clear that Woodruff drew on her own experiences with her husband ABC Bob Woodruff's traumatic brain injuries suffered during the Iraq War to write these emotional passages.

I can't remembered being so viscerally affected by a novel; Woodruff's first work of fiction is emotional, heartbreaking and ultimately uplifting. This is a book I will recommend to anyone looking for a story to lose yourself in. show less