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Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:Holly Frick has just endured the worst kind of breakup: the kind where you're still in love with the person leaving you. While her wounds are still dangerously close to the surface, her happily married best friend confesses over a bottle of wine that she is this close to having an affair. And another woman comes to Holly for advice about her love life â?? with Holly's ex! Holly decides that if everyone around her can take pleasure wherever they find it, so will she. As any self-respecting thirtyish New York woman would do, she brings two males into her life: a flawed but endearing dog, and a good natured, much younger lover. She's soon entangled in a web of emails, chance meetings, and misguided good intentions and must forge an entirely new path to Nirvana. From the author of The Big Love, Secrets to Happiness is a big-hearted, knife-sharp, and hilariously entertaining story about the perils of love and friendship, sex and betrayal â?? and a thoroughly modern take on our struggle to be… (more)
Not really the greatest read for a guy. Thought it might be interesting based on the title but I stuck with it to the end. Even though it’s fictional still a lot like real life. I did like the ending and what happened with Chester the dog. The best part I took was a line at the end about GOD. Page 273. ( )
If I could give this negative stars, I would. It only got one star because I managed to finish it. A group of hateful people ruin each other and themselves out of middle class boredom. That's basically my take on a terrible example of "chick lit." I'm really annoyed I read this. Maybe I'm missing some kind of humor the author intended, but I honestly came away from this book thinking Dunn is the biggest misogynist I've ever come across. Well, to be fair the male characters are equally atrocious. There is nothing good about this book-STAY FAR AWAY FROM IT. I used to enjoy this type of book. Then I graduated from college and discovered there was more to life than men. And I can really be friends with other women. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single sexual stereotype left out of this book. Grrr...I'm getting angry all over again :-) I'm also starting to think it deserves 1/8 of another star just for getting this kind of reaction from me. That must say something about it, right?? ( )
Surface characters with a surface plot, I just couldnt find it in myself to care about the main protaganist, Holly, and there just seemed to be no point at all. There were some good lines but otherwise a bland self indulgent feel that didn't appeal at all. ( )
"Do you want to know the secret to a happy marriage?"
Quotations
Okay, I just think it's kind of interesting, how you apparently take all the stuff so seriously that you go away for weekends to meditate and you buy books [...] but you still, Holly searched for the phrase, "carry on with Amanda." [...] it's not enough to say 'whatever happens, happens' and 'I'm just a leaf in the stream' because, at the very minimum, what you are doing is profoundly unethical." [pp.112-113, brackets added]
"Is it possible to be off your path? [...]
"I think that is just a shorthand people use about being true to yourself." [...]
"But no, see, it's not," said Holly. "Because then there would be a path, but you could walk off it by not being true to yourself. [...] But that's not the way people use it. It's all your path. [...] And if it's all your path, I don't see how 'staying on your path' is such a great accomplishment, since it is impossible, ipso facto, to be off it. [p.152, brackets added]
As Spence got older, he found that grooming was calling for a level of focus and precision and commitment that he was not altogether prepared to give it. Every time he looked in the mirror, if he really looked, if he looked hard, he'd see that something was demanding to be trimmed or shaved or plucked or tamed or, and this had happened more than once, removed in a dermatologist's office under local anesthesia. [p. 171]
It never ceased to amaze Holly, how therapists managed to spin things. And the longer you lived in a place like Manhattan [...] the more you suspected that this was the truth: that the aim of psychotherapy was to make it possible for a person to do whatever they wanted to do, with whomever they wanted to do it, when and where and however the hell they felt like it, while reaping no negative emotional consequences whatsoever. [pp.178-179, brackets added]
Spiritual but not religious! Â Who came up with that nonsense?! Â [...] Spence had been known to grill his dates on precisely what they meant by this, and he had come away with the understanding that 'spiritual but not religious' meant the following: they comforted themselves with the notion that there was a God but they never bothered to investigate the proposition or even think about it all that much. Â Like believing in Santa Claus. Â [p. 198, brackets added]
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:Holly Frick has just endured the worst kind of breakup: the kind where you're still in love with the person leaving you. While her wounds are still dangerously close to the surface, her happily married best friend confesses over a bottle of wine that she is this close to having an affair. And another woman comes to Holly for advice about her love life â?? with Holly's ex! Holly decides that if everyone around her can take pleasure wherever they find it, so will she. As any self-respecting thirtyish New York woman would do, she brings two males into her life: a flawed but endearing dog, and a good natured, much younger lover. She's soon entangled in a web of emails, chance meetings, and misguided good intentions and must forge an entirely new path to Nirvana. From the author of The Big Love, Secrets to Happiness is a big-hearted, knife-sharp, and hilariously entertaining story about the perils of love and friendship, sex and betrayal â?? and a thoroughly modern take on our struggle to be
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