I could not figure out the point of Isabel Gillies’ memoir, Happens Every Day,in which she tells the story of the end of her marriage. Strangely enough, given that it is a memoir, she exhibits limited self-knowledge and miniscule skills of introspection and self-examination, other than to say “that is just the way I am” or that she was raised to be a certain way; she does say her mother was perfect, a woman who worked a full-time job and got dinner on the table every night and that “living up to her example hasn’t been easy”.  Now that could get interesting: why does Isabel feel she has to live up to her mother? But Isabel doesn’t follow up that question, or ask or follow-up on any hard questions at all, ever.

Of course, without examining either herself or her marriage too deeply, other than trying to figure out whether or not her husband is having an affair and engaging in a five-day session with a marriage counselor which she covers in two slight pages, Gillies cannot and does not change (other than going from being married to being unmarried).  So what is the point?

I really cannot tell you what the point of this book is, other than passing on embarrassing details that we the reader can snigger and gasp over.  Details like the fact that she and her husband called each other “bully”  and that they called their house “Bricky”, that her parents call a strong disagreement between husband and wife a “Mr. and Mrs”, that her husband reading more meant he no longer loved he, and that the saying “take the high road” helped get her through the divorce.  How high a road exactly?  One that included writing a book?

Appearances are everything to Gillies. The look of her house (the orange grove William Morris wallpaper, the perfect Provence yellow tone of the paint that took hours of dripping orange paint into yellow to achieve, and the “fantastic armchair that I had covered in a Lulu DK stripe”) or her family (“I could feel them looking at us and marveling at lovely it all seemed”) she takes as the sum and definition of her life. If everything looked so good, she reasoned, nothing could go wrong. Are you kidding me?  What planet did she reside on, what high school cliques was she never excluded from, how many scores of books has she never understood?

The inner reasons for her attraction to her husband, questions about her upbringing and her obsessive compulsion to be the good girl and in the right, that is the kind of stuff  that Gillies would just rather not get into.  She can no more plumb the depths of herself or her marriage than she can understand how anyone could get married without getting a pedicure first (“Didn’t all people who wear Prada … have the good sense to get their toes done before they get married?”: the question is didn’t some editor have the good sense to take this sentence out of the book before it was published?).

Again, I come back to my question of what was the point of this book.  A chronicle of change?  None noted.  A chronicle of survival?  In the epilogue, she does tells us she meets the “love of her life.”  I guess that could count as survival and she would not have met love-of-life if hubby hadn’t skipped out, but I don’t think meeting him was the point of the book. A chronicle of loss? I didn’t feel the sorrow.  Of course I felt badly for the children, and I wonder what impact this book will have on her two boys when they read it. I hope they never do. The point, I suppose, was to sell a book.  Good luck with that.  Perhaps if she had insisted on covering the outside in a DK Lulu stripe, it would be jumping off the shelves.