Do you have an author who, while reading a book of theirs for the first time, you immediately said to yourself, “I MUST read every book that this person ever wrote!”?
Emily Giffin is that sort of author for me, along with Sharyn McCrumb, Clyde Edgerton, Douglas Adams, Greg Bear, and Tracy Chevalier.
My favorite thing about Giffin's books is her appealingly imperfect characters. Each protagonist has some peculiarly human flaw, maybe one that we have ourselves but don’t want to admit (hubris, lust/infidelity, stubbornness, an inability to let go of the past). The flaw leads the character into sticky situations that make you ask yourself, “What would I do if it were me?”
Giffin delves so deeply into each main character’s emotions and motivations that, by the end, you feel like you’ve lived a part of someone else’s life from inside their head. She does character so well that the plots are sort of beside the point. (I’d say the same about Clyde Edgerton.) That may seem like a strange compliment for an author, but I think it’s a remarkable talent.
Loving City Life
In Giffin’s book Love the One You’re With, a married couple decides to move from New York City to Atlanta. The husband is thrilled, because Atlanta is his hometown. The wife is ambivalent, because she loves New York.
This passage rings true for a lot of big cities, including Chicago. It sums up perfectly why I'll be sad if/when I ever move out of the city.
…It’s the little things that get to me the most as we wind down our affairs in the city and hurtle toward our June closing date. It’s the rich fabric of my daily life—things that barely registered before but that now feel sentimental. It’s my walk to work and the silent camaraderie of other commuters swelling in the crosswalks around me. … It’s our dry cleaner’s deep frown lines as he determinedly knots the plastic around Andy’s shirts and then tells us to have a nice day in his Turkish accent, and my Korean manicurist’s chipper command to “pick polish,” even though she must know by now that I always bring my own. It’s the sway of the subway careening efficiently along the tracks, and the satisfaction of flagging down a cab on a bustling weekend night in the Village. It’s the burgers at P.J. Clarke’s, the dim sum at Chinatown Brasserie, and the bagels at my corner bodega. It’s knowing that when I walk out of our brownstone, I will see something new every single day. It’s the diversity of choices and people, the raw urban beauty, the endless hum of possibility everywhere.
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