Wednesday, August 19, 7:30 p.m.

The Slippery Year  BUY NOW

For anybody who has ever wondered privately Is this all there is, Melanie Gideon’s poignant, hilarious, exuberant meditation, The Slippery Year, chronicles a year in which she confronts both the fantasies of her receding youth and the realities of midlife with a husband, a child, and a dog (one of whom runs away). She reflects on the exigencies of domesticity—the need for a household catastrophe plan, the fainting spell occasioned by the departure of her nine-year-old son for camp, the mattress wars, and the carpool line. With tenderness, unsparing honesty, and uproarious wit, Gideon brings us back again and again to the sweetness of ordinary pleasures and to life’s most enduring satisfactions. She captures perfectly that moment right before everything changes and the things we have loved forever begin to fall away for the first time.

“Ever wonder what’s running through your wife’s mind? Read The Slippery Year. Gideon has an utterly charming way of turning the constant compromises of married life into riotous poetic insight.”
—Po Bronson, author of NutureShock 

Photo Credit: Jonathan Sprague

Jane Juska, Special to The Chronicle

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/02/RVHD18K7II.DTL#ixzz0O2fnHmCG