We get it—there is simply too much. So, as in years past, we are giving our editors a last-minute opportunity to plug the books, movies, albums, shows, skits, or any piece of cultural ephemera that didn’t quite get the attention or acclaim it deserved. To entertain your holiday guests, we present all the things you really should know about—as well as more of our year-in-review coverage—here.
Advance apologies if I have a personal relationship with you (friend, book club member, crossing guard at my kids’ school), because you have undoubtedly already heard me say this: I absolutely loved this book.
A short digression first: A newspaper editor friend of mine was describing once how she decided what to put on the front page of the business section, which she was newly managing. I had noticed a series of seemingly softer stories—about the formula crisis or the cost of childcare—and had said something benign about how I’d observed a more diverse array of subjects. “Well,” she said, looking at me levelly, “who do you think was deciding what was important before I took over this job?”
I tell this story now because I think even those of us who read widely, or read for a living, can attach apologies to our predilections. It’s a beach read, a guilty pleasure, a domestic novel—as if those categories that have historically been more feminine are lesser. “There is a hierarchy of subject matter,” Hilary Mantel once wrote in an essay explaining how domestic fiction has been routinely relegated to a lesser category. “Warfare should get more space than childbirth, though both are bloody.” What is actually more important than family? Than raising a child? Where are the stakes higher?
Loved and Missed is one of those books that makes you feel those stakes in your stomach. When I have described this book to people, I have called it a thriller about parenting. You will either read it in one gulp, or find it almost too much to bear and have to parcel it out to yourself in pieces so it doesn’t shatter your nerves. But there’s no wrong way to read it—friends have appreciated it in both modes.