You are the Love of My Life; A Novel

New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. First Edition [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Stephen Wilkes (Jacket photograph). 298, [6] pages. Inscribed on the title page by the author. Inscription reads: To Ann, with love and friendship and all best wishes Sue, and then signed Susan Richards Shreve under her printed name. Susan Shreve (also known as Susan Richards Shreve) is an American novelist, memoirist, and children's book author. She has published fifteen novels, most recently More News Tomorrow (2019), and a memoir Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood (2007). She has also published thirty books for children, most recently The Lovely Shoes (2011), and edited or co-edited five anthologies. Shreve co-founded the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing program at George Mason University in 1980, where she teaches writing. She is the co-founder and the former chairman of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. It is 1973 and the scandal of Watergate is on everyone's lips. Lucy Painter, children's book writer and single mother of two, is leaving New York and the married father of her children, to return to the house in the tightly knit Washington, DC, neighborhood where she grew up and where she discovered her father's suicide. Lucy hopes for a fresh start, but her life is full of secrets: her children know nothing of the circumstances surrounding her father's death or of the identity of their own father. As new neighbors enter their insular lives, the safety and stability of her family are in jeopardy. This is a story of how shame leads to secrets, secrets lead to lies, and how lies stand in the way of human connection. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Shreve explores the damaging ripple effect of secrets in her emotional and psychologically compelling newest. Lucy Painter discovered her hanged father in their house in Washington, D.C. His suicide instilled in Lucy an abiding shame, and became the root of her reclusiveness and belief in "necessary" lies. Later, Lucy becomes a successful children's book illustrator and a single mother, but keeps the father's identity hidden from her children, preteen Maggie and young Felix because he is a married man. In 1973, Lucy and her kids move from New York back to Lucy's childhood home, where she struggles with intrusive neighbors, especially the headstrong Zee Mallory. To Lucy's increasing chagrin, Zee begins "appropriating" Maggie, who is hurt by her mother's emotional reticence. Only when Lucy realizes that she may lose her daughter does she summon the courage to reveal her past. Shreve has an authoritative command of narrative, and she portrays the younger characters with insight and pitch-perfect dialogue, crafting a message of transparency and acceptance that resonates beyond the home.