The winner: Show me where it hurts

Announcing the winner of this book giveaway: Megan from Exile in Kidville.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned here that the author Darin Strauss was doing a bit of high-profile book touring. You have to love this next part. He noticed what I said and he sent me his book, More Than It Hurts You. I'm offering it as a giveaway this week, as I like to do, and here's why you should ask for it.

I thought it was just a few years ago, but turns out it was more like six (!), that I read something that left me weak and weepy to the point of exhaustion. It wasn't as though I loved the book, or even liked it. Some of my very smart and well-read friends disagreed, but I thought the author Jonathan Franzen, in The Corrections, had nailed the whole of our unsayable lives. The ignorance and cynicism, the glib cleverness, the buried sorrow and habitual self-deception, and at the barren bottom of all our failings, the love. Still, the love.

More Than It Hurts You is that kind of ride. An ambitious and frantic story about how none of us – not one of us – is honest or fair or true or what we appear, even to ourselves, to be. It's a story about the strivings of love, marriage and motherhood, but I don't read stories for the stories. I read to be awed and lost and left to fend for myself on a far shore. I only have so much time, you see, and I don't want to finish a book in the same place I started.

I've heard it called "a beach read." This is no beach read. Oh sure you could read it on the beach, and when you finished, you would sit and stare a long time at the convulsing waves, at the mysteries that combine and divide us. It is a difficult book, an uncomfortable reveal. It cuts close, and it hurts. In a very safe way.

I recommend it. Because good work, and the writers who enslave themselves to it, are so blasted hard to find. When they find you, it makes things better.

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Leave a comment anytime before next Friday, July 25 to enter.