This Is Where I Leave You - SV Moms Book Club

I was unsure how I would relate to Jonathan Tropper's novel This is Where I Leave You, about a man who walks in on his wife having an affair with his boss and ends up pregnant right when his father died, and his father's dying wish is for his family to sit shiva for a full seven days. I am not Jewish, so we don't sit shiva, and I certainly never walked in on my husband having an affair with my boss. Which is a good thing. But I have lost a parent, and grandparents who were as close as parents, and I come from a profoundly dysfunctional family, so I do share that with Judd Foxman.

I'm good with my family in small doses. As long as we don't have to spend too much time together, we're can manage to maintain the superficial relationship we have to maintain to be civil to one another. I can't imagine spending a week in close quarters with them, as I'm sure they'd go nuts imagining spending a week with me. It's been that way for as long as I can remember.

But then. Then my grandmother passed away. She lingered in a coma for about a week prior, just enough time for my entire family to gather at her bedside. Both my aunt and my uncle, and their spouses. All of my cousins from Colorado who I hadn't seen in 15-20 years, and their significant others, and their kids. And while it was heart rendingly sad, it was wonderful to be all together like that again, just like we had for so many many years on holidays when we were growing up. There are seven of us in all, five girls and two boys; the bookish, the athletic, the musical, the dramatic, all of us whip smart (seriously I'm the dumbest one of the bunch of us, I think, though the most educated college-wise). It's nice now that we are all adults, since I'm 9 years older than my next closest cousin and growing up we didn't have a lot in common besides the shared experience of having the family we did. We relate better to one another now. I wanted that shared experience for my kids. And I knew if they were going to have it, it would have to come from us.

So I agreed to my husband's request for a fourth baby. Nemo would not be here if not for the experience of my grandmother's death drawing our family together. Really, family is what life's all about, is it not? And whose family isn't dysfunctional to a certain extent? Life would be rather boring if all families were "normal."

This post is part of the Silicon Valley Moms Group Book Club. We don't do book reviews, but rather use the book as a platform for relating to our own lives. The book is laugh out loud funny, at times crude, but a great read.

Comments

[Uncle Orca]

I'm on misplaced modifier patrol:

"...about a man who walks in on his wife having an affair with his boss and ends up pregnant..."

Sounds like an interesting book ;-)