One True Thing

ONE TRUE THING
Anna Quindlen
“Our parents are ….always character traits, Achilles’ heels, dim nightmares, vocal tics, bad noses, hot tears, all handed down and us stuck with them. Our dilemma is utter: turn and look at this woman, understand and pity her, like and talk with her, recognize that she has taken the cold cleanliness of the spartan rooms in which she grew up and turned them, within her considerable and perhaps wounded heart, into a life-long burst of cooking and cosseting and making her own little corner of the world pretty and welcoming, and the separation is complete --- but when that happens you will have to be an adult. There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.”
That is one part of her novel that Anna caught me unconsciously in awe, jaws dropped really. And the momentum seems at its peak when I read those lines that there seems to be a need for me to read and read and reread it again. When I grabbed the book from that store in Robinson’s together with other books by Michael Crichton, I was ambivalent because it appeared that a woman writer may be too emotional for me to read her works and I was afraid things would turn corny and I say, “I may not like that.” But it turned out that this one is distinct from the books I read this week. It is, in fact, a book from and to the heart.
My literature professor once told the class I was in that we should not measure the book by the morals and values that one may get, but by the artistic styles the writer has utilized to invoke these emotions. He may be right, but I cannot just ignore the idea that I bought this book not just to appreciate the artistic side of writing but also to know the meaning that the writer has effortlessly tried to bring out of her readers.
Well, the story revolves from facts of life – that you cannot just love without sacrifice, that life is too short - to think of how much time there is, it should rather be of how much is left for our loved ones to spare, that one of the most devastating things a person can do to oneself is caring much of other people’s opinions, that there is much more life in a small college town than New York, and that death is as imminent as sunset. These are all parts of plots and I love everything that the story’s all about. It’s surreal and for real – there is humanity in the world Anna created with One True Thing.
Mother’s love is the greatest, indeed.