The Rest of Her Life

Despite the cover, which on my copy carried a glowing endorsement from Jodi Picoult and a romantic image of a wistful teenager, this is actually a very good book, in my opinion. I'm sure the reason it doesn't get a higher rating from most LibraryThing readers is that they'd rather read Jodi Picoult's rather more commercial work with a happier ending. But Laura Moriarty has actually given us what appears to be a somewhat more realistic view of the consequences of a tragic accident. People don't live happily ever after. Some people do live on but with permanent damage. No one feels that justice has been done and people who are involved do not become reconciled by some miracle of god or human kindness. Families that seemed to be show more functioning OK before the trauma now have their hidden problems brought out into the open. Friendships are stretched, almost to the limit. show less

I found Leigh, the main character, difficult to sympathize with, because she's always worrying about the wrong things, and assuming everyone dislikes her. But once I read about her childhood with her own mother, it made sense.

And unlike Leigh's mother, Leigh grows and changes and learns how to develop healthier relationships with the people she cares about.

The author has a lot of insight into growing up raised by a narcissist. I enjoyed that that aspect wasn't the main storyline, though. If you don't know narcissists, you probably wouldn't realize why Leigh has so much trouble acting 'normally'. It's something you learn by trial and error, and you misinterpret other people's actions all the time, assume malice where there isn't any. show more It takes years to unlearn all of it. show less

In The Rest of Her Life, Laura Moriarty delivers a luminous, compassionate, and provocative look at how mothers and daughters with the best intentions can be blind to the harm they do to one another.
Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy -- the effects of which not only divide Leigh's family, but polarize the entire community. We see the story from Leigh's perspective, as she grapples with the hard reality of what her daughter has done and the devastating consequences her actions have on the family of another teenage girl in town, all while show more struggling to protect Kara in the face of rising public outcry. show less

Moriarty's latest novel is a brilliant study in the relationships between mothers and daughters. Leigh Churchill's relationship with her daughter Kara is a perfect example of how even the best intentions may not be good enough when it comes to loving another person. Leigh strives, with Kara, to make up for the things that her relationship with her own mother was lacking - kindness, concern, and understanding. Only in the midst of the tragedy of Kara's taking a classmate's life while driving carelessly, does Leigh begin to understand that in trying to be the perfect mother she never had, she is ultimately failing to give her own daughter the love and understanding she desperately needs.

In the meantime, Diane, the mother of Kara's slain show more classmate, struggles to come to terms with her loss under the watchful eyes of Leigh, who often seems to feel more concern for the dead girl and her mother than for her own daughter. Diane grieves the daughter she knew and loved deeply, while Leigh mourns the daughter who stands beside her, but whose thoughts and feelings are impenetrable to her.

The best part of this novel, by far, is watching as the characters begin to build bridges and come to understand each other, finding appropriate places for their confused thoughts and sympathies. While it is a struggle to read about each character’s frustrations in their efforts to connect with each other, when the walls between them finally begin to crumble, it’s a breath of fresh air. This novel deals mercilessly with the realities of relationships, but ultimately gives us cause to believe that even amidst difficulty, there is hope for those that keep on trying to know and to love each other. show less

Although it is true that this book starts off with the tragedy from which the rest of the events flow, even that does not explain why, from almost the first sentence, the words seemed to be practically dripping with despair.

“The Rest of Her Life” is seemingly focused on a terrible accident that takes one young girl’s life (Bethany) and forever alters that of the young girl (Kara) that hits her in a car accident …but which, at least in my humble opinion, delves far deeper into the life of Leigh Churchill, Kara’s mother.

While she is trying to deal with all of the effects of the accident upon herself, her family, her emotions…we learn that Leigh is in deep denial about herself and her relationship with her daughter. Prior t the show more accident, she internally reflects that she is happy, that her family is happy, but that hardly seems true. There seem to be far too many unspoken frustrations between her and her husband, Gary. Gary and their son, Justin, have a very strained relationship, and it appears at times that Justin is almost afraid of his father. Leigh and Kara seem to do little more than inhabit the same house.

This is a story of a seemingly perfect small town family…one mom, one dad, a son and daughter…picket fence and all. Yet that fence certainly does not surround a happy home. Gradually we find out that the reason Leigh is unaware of this is that her childhood and her relationship with her mother was barely functional to start with, and ended when her mother left her at 16.

Some of Leigh’s thoughts about and reactions to her daughter seemed nearly implausible to me. She simply doesn’t know how to talk to or react to or even look at her daughter. It seems as if her detachment with Kara stemmed from either Kara being her first child, or possibly due to Kara being a girl and Leigh’s unconscious replication of her own mother’s attitude.

“The sadness she was feeling, she decided, was for Kara, for the sense of having already lost her. The arrival of the college catalogs made their impending separation seem real and imminent, and Leigh had the sense that she’d run out of time without accomplishing a task she couldn’t quite name, failing them both in some important way.”

But then with Justin, the universality of her motherly instincts floored me.

“Watching (Justin) from the window, Leigh felt a surge of unaccountable and overwhelming love. She wished she could be invisible for a moment. She would go outside, put her hands around Justin’s waist, and without his knowing, lift him high enough so he could easily drop the ball into the hoop.”

There are few people, other than Gary and Justin that Leigh has anything approaching a real relationship with. Her one friend, Eva, is kept at extreme arm’s length. Her co-workers…”I keep to myself, she had more or less told them, with every averted glance and fleeting smile, with every lunch break she spent reading at her desk or talking to Gary on her cell phone. She couldn’t say, for certain, why she had taken pains to shut them all out. It wasn’t something she had planned on or even thought about – her behavior felt instinctive, somehow linked to her very survival.”

The car accident is her daughter’s. Although many of Leigh’s thoughts afterward start out with Kara, they invariably turn to her. Everything she feels and thinks is ultimately about her. At the heart of it, she only knows, trusts, has herself.

“She had to lean against the counter for a moment, overwhelmed by self-loathing and sadness. She was within thirty feet she loved most in the world, and she’d never felt more alone.”

In “The Rest of Her Life”, a tragedy takes the life of a young girl, and forever alters another young girl, but ultimately is the most ironic type of gift to Leigh. It reveals that her emotions and relationships are on the brink of destruction, and she is able to reach a level of self-awareness and strength that allows her to pull back from the edge and choose a different path. Where she had no real life before, now she has a rest of her life, one she no longer has to live alone.

“This was perhaps what it was like to mother anyone, Leigh decided, far away or close. You could only try your best, then wait to see if what you sent was needed or even wanted. If it wasn’t, then you packed a new box, and tried again.” show less

This book came to me from Harper Collins First Look program. I was really excited to receive this book because I had read Laura Moriarty's first novel, The Center of Everything, a few years ago and thought it was excellent.

This story is told by Leigh Churchill, a grade school teacher in Danby, Kansas. She is married to Gary, a professor at the local college, and they have two children, Kara and Justin. Kara is 18 and about to graduate from high school. Justin is younger, pre-teenage, but I don't know if his actual age is ever mentioned. At the outset of the story, Kara hits a 16 year old girl with the Suburban she has been driving since she got her driver's license. The 16 year old, Bethany Cleese, dies instantly. Leigh comes home from show more the last day of school to find Gary, Kara and Justin sitting in the living room looking shell-shocked. The book progresses throughout that summer and we learn how that accident affects everyone in the family.

Laura Moriarty really knows how to get inside someone's head. Although she mentions her own daughter in the acknowledgements, I'm pretty sure she has never been the mother of someone who has killed someone else. Nevertheless, her exploration of Leigh's reactions ring absolutely true. And it's not just Leigh that we come to know through this book. Kara and Justin seemed real to me too as did Leigh's best friend, Eva.

This is the kind of book that makes you think "What if that happened to me? How would I react if I killed someone by accident? What would I do if my child killed someone by accident?" This book would be an interesting read for a book club because it could provoke lots of interesting discussion. show less

Leigh's teenage daughter Kara accidentally kills another teenage while driving her father's car. As the family greives the loss of the dead girl and the loss of the life that Kara had previously known, the deep fissures in the family come boiling to the surface.

Leigh and her daughter Kara seem to have lost the bond that was once present when Kara was a young child. Their relationship has devolved into a series of uncomfortable moments, awkward silences, general animosity and teenage rudeness. Leigh seems desperate to try to reach her daughter but her daughter appears not to care a hoot about her mother or her feelings rather having a very close and loving relationship with her father.

While there is a certain indefinable something that show more may make this book unappealing, that same something, is what makes this book likable for me. There is a realism that this story portrays that while unpleasant is very true. No one wakes up one day and wants to have a bad relationship with their child or resentment toward their spouse for being close to the said child. But sadly these things happen. I am not at all implyng that Leigh is an innocent bystander and things just happened to her but she seems to try to connect with Kara and her efforts are constantly met with failure. Leigh's husband Gary is without a doubt a loving husband and father but just as Leigh has somehow failed to build ties with her daughter, so has Gary with their son Justin. The family in some ways seems to be divided into two halves, Gary and Kara, Leigh and Justin.

There is something inherently infantile about many of Leigh's responses to life. She constantly talks about "trying to be nice". Its like she is constantly looking for affirmation and acceptance and just wants someone to pat her on the back. But its not in a self serving or arrogant way, more in a deeply insecure manner. Leigh appears to be unable to form any close bonds with others except for Gary, her sister Pam and her son Justin. She has no work friends or childhood friends and even her one friend is the town gossip Eva who quite frankly no one should tell anything personal to because it will be all over town in three minutes.

Leigh is deeply flawed as most people are despite their best intentions. She strives to be all that her own mother never was: emotionally available to her child, kind, loving and caring. Sadly it is almost like she read the parent handbook on how to raise a child and decides to follow it to the letter and is shocked when it does not work. Her mother was emotionally abusive to both of her children and eventually abadoned Leigh when she was fifteen, leaving behind a daughter that swore that she would be a fabulous mother when she had her own children. This book is a perfect play on what transpires between love and its execution. Many times the desire to do right may not be translated as we would like and we end up hurting the very people that we want to protect. This book is almost brutal in its honesty and while it won't necessarily leave you warm and fuzzy, it will make you think and gives you hope. show less