" This is not a story with a happy ending. You know that from the very beginning, so I'm not spoiling anything. It's a story about a marriage bust-up, with kids and all. There's nothing cheery about it. Neither of the parties involved come out looking particularly good. He did end up leaving his wife for another woman, but even she seems equivocal (at least in my view) about the extent to which something was actually going as the marriage fell apart. Then again, maybe it's because she never really knew. What Isabel Gillies does manage to convey so convincingly is the rapidity of the decline...it's all over within four months. Without his side of the story, it's difficult to assess how long he had really been unhappy--the answer to that question might explain the rapid decline. In some ways, this memoir seems her attempt to find the answer to those unanswerable questions: when did it start to disintegrate? what did I do wrong? The reasons why she asks these, however, remain puzzling to me. She's now happily remarried...while picking over the detritus of her previous marriage may be therapeutic for her (and vaguely interesting for her readers as she does write well), there are certainly those left in Ohio (surely) who know exactly who she's writing about. As she says, Oberlin was (is) a small community. "
— Felicity, 1/19/2014