Your Attention...Please

I must begin this discussion with a completely straightforward “DISCLAIMER DISCLAIMER DISCLAIMER,” as Kirstin and Justin of the highly amusing and informative This Week in Science podcast say (often). The situation Brooke Foster dissects in her new The Way They Were, the one of adult children whose parents are divorcing, is not one I have ever been in or am particularly familiar with. The book has positioned itself as “The only guide for adult children….How to deal with your parents’ divorce when you’re not a kid anymore.” Being the way I am—i.e. the kind of person who will read absolutely anything, with fairly little regard to subject matter—and being that Brooke is a family friend, I read the book without hesitation. Still, my lack of firsthand (or second- or third-) experience renders my appreciation and comprehension of the book rather less than it would be for someone seeking advice from within that situation.

Each chapter addresses a specific challenge the children (and divorcing parents) must face during and after the breakdown of the parents’ marriage. They address topics such as parental regression, feeling caught in between parents, stepfamilies, adultery, and trust, pointing out both differences and similarities to the experiences younger children might have in the same situation. Each chapter concludes with a bulleted list of things to remember from the chapter, a kind of checklist.

Foster (isn’t it funny, that when you know someone, you want to use their first name? I keep wanting to call her Brooke—and up there in the first paragraph, look what I did) uses bits of her own personal story, as well as numerous anecdotes from interviewees and comments from psychologists. Taken as a whole, they paint a realistic picture of the situation while retaining optimism for the future.

If I had been reading the book looking for advice, I think I might have appreciated hearing a more cohesive story about Foster’s (and I just had to erase “Brooke” to write that) experiences, rather than others’ anecdotes, many of which seemed to make the same point in many different ways while breaking up the book’s flow. I have a very definite position on books: tell me a story. I hold nonfiction to that standard as much as I do novels. I want to hear about experiences—real or fictional—and take from them what I can or choose.

But the book isn’t, and was obviously never meant to be, a tell-all memoir. It’s a guide, a how-to. While I don’t take well to being told what to do—and this book seems to try at times—I know many if not most people do. And how can I possibly say what I would want or need if I were in that situation? I’m not—and because of that, I’m not authorized to so much as guess at how I’d feel. When your life is in so much turmoil, sometimes I guess it’s easier to have someone sit you down and gently, compassionately tell you what to do.

Ultimately, I can say with confidence that the book is well-written; while Foster’s journalistic tendencies (she’s a staff writer for the Washingtonian) probably cause the anecdotal choppiness, they also enable her to write with self-assured expressiveness. Her experiences will of no doubt be of help to many others.