Word: husband
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...some it can be the focus of a lifetime. Maggie Moran in Breathing Lessons is one of those people for whom love is everything. Maggie and Ira have been married for 25 years when they travel across Pennsylvania to attend the funeral of Maggie's best friend's husband. The novel alternates between Ira's and Maggie's points of view and is told mostly in flashbacks...
...journey reveals the failure of Maggie's dreams. It's mild failure, a dimming of hope and not a crushing defeat. But the bickering in her marriage and her husband's condescension have worn her down. Ira treats Maggie in a dismissive, if occasionally affectionate way. He sees her as flighty. Eventually Maggie can't help but doubt herself and to hope for vicarious happiness to escape a life that isn't what she hoped it would...
...love Maggie pretends exists between Jesse and Fiona reflects the hopes she had for her marriage to Ira. Maggie is caught between what she knows about herself and what her husband tells her she is. For Tyler, love is seeing yourself in your lover's eyes and assessing that version against the person you would like to be. The problem is that we invariably erect barriers to prevent ourselves from truly communicating and from being vulnerable...
...Most shoppers accept this inequality, but not Muriel Mabry and Lori Anderson, two California businesswomen. When they bought dresses this summer at a Saks Fifth Avenue store in Costa Mesa, Calif., they were each charged about $40 for alterations. Meanwhile, the women claim, Anderson's husband bought a suit and tuxedo that the store tailored for free...
Lurie, however, tips her hand, perhaps too early in the book, in the direction of heterosexual detente. The ex-husband, now remarried, is sketched as a decent fellow. Polly's closest friend, a cozy, catlike lesbian named Jeanne, shows herself, in the book's best characterization, to be malicious and totally self-absorbed. Most important, Polly's research, which she and her friends assume will prove that Painter Jones was abused and underrated by the men in her life, goes awkwardly sour. It turns out that Jones was indeed a genius but that she was far harder on men than...