Fly Away Home: A Novel by Marge Piercy
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Her book of poetry The Moon Is Always Female is considered a seminal feminist text. Piercy’s other works include Woman on the Edge of Time, The Longings of Women, and City of Darkness, City of Light. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, radio personality and author Ira Wood, with whom she cowrote the novel Storm Tide. I am an admitted Weiner fan and enjoy her very real, down-to-earth style. I loved this book and I saw Weiner grow into a more broad spectrum of "Chick Lit" with this book.
Sylvie had made a point of raising her own daughters, headstrong Diana and dreamy Lizzie, to be polite, to be considerate, to think of others, and to remember, always, that manners mattered. Even when Lizzie was in the throes of her drug use, Sylvie liked to think that her younger daughter had said please and thank you to her dealer. Found on a book exchange shelf where I was leaving a BookCrossing book.
Fly Away Home: A Novel Audio CD
Listened to as an audiobook, narrated by Judith Light. After the disaster that was Weiner's last book , I started this book with trepidation. But it was quite soon that my fears and doubts were put to rest.
One night she comes home and there are protesters in front of her house. They say her husband is a slumlord and so is she, as her name is on the deeds of the rental homes where they live in a working-class area of Boston that is slowly gentrifying. Daria invites them in to hear their stories, for surely there is a misunderstanding.
Reviews
The men in her books always play a secondary role in that they either contribute to and cause the dysfunction, or take a secondary role in being the supporter of the new and improved character. I would recommend this book if you want something light, and have nothing else on your plate to read..... I'm honestly kind of shocked I'm giving this four stars, because it started off really slow. I picked it up from a BookBub email for $1.99 as it looked interesting, but was disappointed with the beginning and almost stopped reading. It was a typical middle-aged woman slowly realizing her husband is having an affair, she's devastated, she's crawling up her own backside trying to figure out what she did wrong, we've read it a hundred times and it's never not boring. But something kept me going as the story peeled back slowly, layer by layer like an onion.
So what if every once in a while late at night she felt like all she had to show for her years on the planet were miles logged on a treadmill that took her nowhere and a number on the scale that was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain? Next, Sylvie's work- and run-aholic oldest daughter Diana is having her own affair to escape her boring husband. Finally, Sylvie's youngest daughter Lizzie, newly released from a drug and alcohol rehab facility, is trying to stay sober in the face of some very stressful events. They all come together at Sylvie's family beach house in Connecticut to try to put their lives back together. Fly Away Home is a novel that sounds like it is ripped from headlines. Sylvie Serfer Woodruff has changed herself over the years into the perfect politician’s wife.
Internet Archive Audio
However, these aspects of Daria's domestic prowess give her and her cooking a public role. There is a lot to be critical of in this book- a lot of sentences that don't hang together well, a sense of careless in the writing that is surprising to me. Her secondary villians are so cartoonishly bad that they are laughable. But there is a lot that makes a deep emotional sense, and her solutions- well, they resonate strongly. Jennifer Weiner is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including Good in Bed and In Her Shoes, which was made into a major motion picture. A graduate of Princeton University, Jennifer is also the co-creator and executive producer for the ABC Family show State of Georgia.
Once the press conference is over, each is forced to reconsider her life, who she is and who she is meant to be. All of their worlds are changed forever when it is discovered that Richard had an affair with a young staffer and helped her to get a job. Without Richard to take care of, Sylvie realizes that she has not been taking care of herself. Diana realizes that she is more like her father than she thinks . As she is having a torrid affair with a young intern.
Weiner, Jennifer
The thing I really found interesting in this book is that Jennifer divulged details in such a way that the reader doesn't really get confused as the story progresses. Each part of their lives is broken up in three separate phases, which helps you understand what happens when and why. Every other chapter is from a different person's POV, assisting you to know what is happening concurrently in their lives.
You know, I can't remember if I've ever read this book before. I feel like I must have, because I've read all of Marge Piercy's novels except for two. But either I read this long ago and had forgotten it, or somehow I just missed it. The naivety of the central character rankled at times. The ‘happy ever after ‘ ending was a bit trite.
Her husband, Richard Woodruff, is a high powered senator from New York with dreams of being the president. They have two daughters, Diana and Lizzie. Diana is a doctor with a seemingly perfect life with her husband and son, if you don’t count that fact that she doesn’t love her husband. Lizzie is a troubled twenty-four year old recovering addict who is trying to find her way in the world. This one was okay, but it was by far, my least favorite Jennifer Weiner book. Ceil and Sylvie roomed together for all four years of college, much to Sylvie’s parents’ unspoken but palpable dismay .
Her older sister, Diana, an emergency room physician, has everything Lizzie failed to achieve—a husband, a young son, the perfect home—and yet she’s trapped in a loveless marriage. With temptation waiting in one of the ER’s exam rooms, she finds herself craving more. I rather enjoyed Sylvie and Lizzie’s parts of the story, but had major issues with Diana, for several reasons. From the beginning to the end, I had a hard time mustering up any sympathy for her.
Diane is bored in her marriage and tired of working as a doctor. She is having a hard time berating her father's actions when she herself is entangled in an affair with one of her medical students. Lizzie, who has just gotten out of rehab, finally has a chance to live a great life when her world also comes crashing down. Sylvie reminded me a lot of my grandmother who was very focused on my grandfather and not on raising her child. This caused problems for poor Lizzie in the novel as well as Sylvie when Richard was suddenly out of the picture. Lizzie had a variety of problems, and I loved her growth to a mature young woman throughout the book and her ability to put the problems behind her.
The main characters were terrific, people I ended up caring about a lot. At times, the book dragged a bit because of the wealth of details included, and the novel would have benefited from more dialogue and less background. But the story was engrossing, and it was worth following through to the end.
Parts of it felt kind of inevitable--some of the foreshadowing was a bit hammer-to-the-head for the reader less clueless than the protagonist--but overall I stayed up late to finish it, so I guess I enjoyed it. I hated this book, Daria is a woman without a backbone or a clue. Romance is an aspect of the novel, but does not overwhelm the political points Piercy makes about women's roles and feminism; property development and moral turpitude and family dynamics. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Fly Away Home by Marge Piercy. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Can't remember the title or the author of a book?
My real quibbles with the book are questions of taste-- I find realism, qua realism kind of boring, whether it's Weiner or Franzen, and in my experience, neither writer has done what it'll take to change that. Also, and this might be a more significant thematic problem with the book, no story seems to really impact the other... In at least some sense, Sylvie's extramarital experience should have some impact on Diane's adultery, but the novel never goes there, and actually denies any connection, which seems a little weird. There are, as a result, no emotional surprises-- in fact, the book feels a little programmatic in a way that's not always flattering.
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