In the neat little Pennsylvania house, with senile, dribbling Uncle George and her sly son Cliffie, Edith watches the stranglehold of everyday life tighten its grip. She retreats into her diary where she builds a perfect fantasy of a very different life.
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In the neat little Pennsylvania house, with senile, dribbling Uncle George and her sly son Cliffie, Edith watches the stranglehold of everyday life tighten its grip. She retreats into her diary where she builds a perfect fantasy of a very different life.
Read Less
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Seller's Description:
Good. Book Mass market paperback, good in black and white pictorial wraps. 318 pp. As Edith Howland's life becomes harsh, her diary entries only become brighter and brighter. She invents a happy life. As she knits for imaginary grandchildren, the real world recedes. Her descent into madness is subtle, appalling, and entirely believable.
Edith and Brett Howland move from New York City to the small town of Brunswick Corners Pa. They hope to one day start their own newspaper and each have ambitions to publish a novel. They have a worrisome young son, Cliffie who doesn't seem to be normal and Brett has an elderly uncle, George with chronic back problems.
The years in this book just melt into one another, the Howlands make friends, Cliffie gets older and does nothing with his life and George becomes a bigger burden to Edith. Edith starts to write in her diary a fantasy life for Cliffie one where he goes to college and meets and falls in love with a young woman named Debbie. Meanwhile the real Cliffie just stays home eats gets drunk and sleeps. Brett falls in love with a younger woman and divorces Edith to marry her. As more time goes by the strain gets to Edith and she changes. She starts to become arguementive with friends and is paranoid. She writes bizarre fanatsy pieces for underground magazines. In her diary Brett is dead and Cliffie is a successful engineer who is married with two children. Brett is alerted her erratic behavior and tries to sway her into seeing a therapist for help but this angers her.
I gave this book three stars because Edith's fate felt like a rushed cop out to me. And the reader is never really privy to some moments of her bizarre behavior they are only just hinted at. I felt this could have been a much better book.