My summary: Lorelai was a remarkable woman--vivacious, filled with joie de vivre, charismatic, and determined to make magic wherever she went. Together with her husband Colin and their four children, they spend many years in their idyllic Cotswold house.
So how is it that Lorelai is now dead, having spent her last years estranged from her family and her last minutes in her car along the side of the highway? Her eldest daughter Meg is forced to ponder this when she returns to her childhood home to sort through Lorelai's effects, but this is complicated by an ugly, nasty complication: the once-beautiful home is practically in ruins, having been stuffed with the results of 30 years of Lorelai's worsening hoarding issues. As Meg begins the painstaking process of trying to clean up the house, as well as rounding up the rest of their estranged family, she is forced to delve deeper into the family's collective memories to try to finally understand how her mother lived and died the way she did.
My verdict: God, this was a hard book to read. I mean, come on: A charismatic, semi-agoraphobic woman with a severe hoarding addiction, who goes downhill with age and alienates most of the people around her? It could have been about my mother. It felt like it was about my mother. And of course I ended up being so angry with Lorelai, so resentful of her. It was very, very difficult to be the reader, witnessing Lorelai's gradual decline into The Crazy, and it made me want to go home and throw out everything I own. (For the record, I am NOT a minimalist, so this book was quite unnerving.) There was a hell of a lot of bloated melodrama with Lorelai's family, and it should have been absurd, but somehow, it lightened the content of the book just enough so that it wasn't completely dark and troubling. Perhaps a bit like a mixture of Maeve Binchy and Jodi Picoult, with a certain flavor all its own--bittersweet.
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