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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
Julia Glass, the bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of Three Junes , returns with a tender, riveting book of two sisters and their complicated relationship.
Louisa Jardine is the older one, the conscientious student, precise and careful: the one who yearns for a good marriage, an artistic career, a family. Clem, the archetypal youngest, is the rebel: committed to her work saving animals, but not to the men who fall for her. In this vivid, heartrending story of what we can and cannot do for those we love, the sisters grow closer as they move further apart. All told with sensual detail and deft characterization, I See You Everywhere is a candid story of life and death, companionship and sorrow, and the nature of sisterhood itself.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Summary
From the author of the best-sellingThree Junescomes an intimate new work of fiction: a tale of two sisters, together and apart, told in their alternating voices over twenty-five years. Louisa Jardine is the older one, the conscientious student, precise and careful: the one who years for a good marriage, an artistic career, a family. Clem, the archetypal youngest, is the rebel: uncontainable, iconoclastic, committed to her work but not to the men who fall for her daring nature. Louisa resents that the charismatic Clem has always been the favorite; yet as Clem puts it, "On the other side of the fence--mine--every expectation you fulfill . . . puts you one stop closer to that Grand Canyon rim from which you could one day rule the world--or plummet in very grand style." In this vivid, heartrending story of what we can and cannot do for those we love, the sisters grow closer as they move farther apart. Louis settles in New York while Clem, a wildlife biologist, moves restlessly about until she lands in the Rocky Mountains. Their complex bond, Louisa observes, is "like a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching." Alive with all the sensual detail and riveting characterization that mark Glass's previous work,I See You Everywhereis a piercingly candid story of life and death, companionship and sorrow, and the nature of sisterhood itself.
Author Notes
Julia Glass was born March 23, 1956, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her debut novel, Three Junes, won the National Book Award in 2002. Her latest novel is entitled, The Widower's tale.
She grew up in Lincoln, MA, and graduated from Yale in 1978. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts with her partner, photographer Dennis Cowley. She has two children and works as a freelance journalist and editor.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
I See You Everywhere has a bourgeois, chick lit sensibility, minus the proud vacuousness of the Bushnell set and plus a somewhat unexpected, sad vanishing act by one of the protagonists. It should prove an engaging and intelligent, though not literary, page-turner for sisters who like to revel in sisterhood. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In her third exquisite, piercing novel, National Book Award winner Glass juxtaposes the temperamentally opposite Jardine sisters. Analytical, cautious Louisa is destined to become an art critic and gallery owner. Reckless, sensual Clem is drawn to the wild and becomes a field biologist dedicated to protecting endangered species. While Louisa seeks marriage and motherhood, Clem catches and releases a stream of lovers. As the two women struggle for their place in the world, they embody archetypal struggles between nature and civilization, self and society. As compelling as the many-faceted Jardine sisters are, so is everyone in their circle, from their foxhound-breeder mother to the men in their lives: a history teacher, animal tracker, stuntman, and guru. Glass' episodic, funny, and deeply inquiring novel is inlaid with priceless set pieces involving the sisters' great-aunt Lucy; Titus, their mother's kennel man; and Esteban, a Haitian artist who knits enormous sculptures. Terrible accidents, epic heartbreak, petty squabbles, and fatal despair are dramatized with Glass' offhanded brilliance and charged with her hunger for enlightenment. Does art matter? Can we protect nature from ourselves? Can we ever truly understand each other, let alone other species? Isn't it our calling as humans to try? Glass is a wisely questioning, ardent, and artful novelist.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Julia Glass's new novel focuses on the complicated emotions - love, hate, envy, grief - that form between female siblings. CONSIDER the phenomenon of women's competitiveness with other women. It was a preoccupation of Goethe's, from his early play "Stella" to his novel "Elective Affinities," written not long after he married his longtime lover, Christiane Vulpius. In "Elective Affinities," the author explained why he believed women couldn't be true friends: "Every woman by her nature excludes every other woman; for every woman is required to do everything the whole sex is required to do." By his line of reasoning, each woman embodies a "right" way to live; and every woman, by her mere existence, threatens every other woman's conviction that her own way is the best way. These are fighting words, of course, and the displaced wife in Goethe's novel tartly asserts her right to take "malicious pleasure" in the observation that oftentimes "gentlemen, too, fail to get on especially well together." This sop notwithstanding, and despite history's heavily charged scroll of masculine conflict, male novelists aren't the only ones to make female rivalry their pet subject Think of George Eliot's Dorothea and Celia Brooke, Austen's Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Louisa May Alcott's March girls. Chekhov wrote that a "story without a woman is like an engine without steam," but the argument can be made that without the alternator of female competitive energies far more than the motor of fiction would shut down. But what of female affinity? Is that not also a force? In her third and most autobiographical novel, "I see You Everywhere," Julia Glass engages this volatile dynamic head-on, presenting a double portrait of mismatched sisters, Louisa and Clem Jardine, whose lives are intertwined, "like a double helix, two souls coiling round a common axis, joined yet never touching." Throughout her life, Louisa - the brainy, cautious, urban older sister - simmers with jealousy over her younger sister's superior vitality, her supercharged love life and her adventurous career in the wilderness, where she works among creatures still wilder than she. Above all, Louisa is jealous of her mother's preference for Clem - a preference thoughtlessly admitted, viva voce, at a family cookout during the girls' school days. Once that prejudice was exposed, proving Louisa hadn't been paranoid when she accused her sister of being the favorite, Clem hoped tensions between them would ease, leaving the sisters "free to be friends," displacing blame for their friction to their mother. "It was like the end of a game of musical chairs," Clem thinks. "Over, all that wondering who'd get the seat; win or lose, the same relief." But for Louisa, bitter satisfaction doesn't equal relief. Years later, Clem's top-dog status still rankles: Louisa wishes she could steal "her role as devil-may-care adventuress" and thinks, "I want to outshine her, I want to be the wiser, the smarter, the better loved." At the same time, whenever accident-prone Clem hurls herself into harm's way, Louisa feels the pull of connection and care: like it or not, she's her sister's keeper: "I want to keep an eye on her," Louisa ruefully concedes. "She is, after all, irreplaceable." Many readers of this novel will know the history that feeds it Julia Glass is a Yale-educated artist who was born in 1956, studied painting in Paris, then turned art into a hobby, working as a copy editor in New York. She began seriously devoting herself to fiction writing only in her late 30s, following a series of devastating events in her private life: her first marriage ended, she discovered she had breast cancer and, soon after that, her younger sister (whose profile resembles Clem's in many respects) committed suicide. Reeling from these misfortunes, Glass sought solace in writing. Remembering a bereaved widower she had met in college during a trip to Greece, she began a short story that grew into the manuscript of "Three Junes." Published in 2002, that novel integrated the linked stories of a Scottish family named McLeod over several decades, beginning in 1989, after the matriarch's death. The family had three sons; the twins, Dennis (a veterinarian) and David (a chef), who stayed in Europe with their wives; and the eldest, Fenno, thin-skinned, introspective and gay, who decamped to New York early on and opened a bookstore in Greenwich Village - a neighborhood that reappears in Glass's subsequent novels. "Three Junes" also included a stand-in for the author, an opinionated college girl named Fern who bumps into the McLeods at both ends of the narrative. Like Glass, Fern "cannot help looking at people in a perpetual context of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. Especially brothers and sisters." "Three Junes" won the National Book Award and established Glass as a sensitive chronicler of modern times, in the expansive 19th-century mode. Her second novel, "The Whole World Over," published two years ago, tumbled many of the first novel's themes and characters - infidelity, parenthood, illness, sibling rivalry, cooking, dogs, even Fenno - into a literary clafoutis. In it, Glass transported her heroine, a chef named Greenie, away from her mopey husband on Bank Street and off to the kitchen of the New Mexico governor's mansion in Santa Fe, where, in short order, she was warmed by an old flame. If that book was a protracted pastry break, the new novel marks a return to more serious ambition. Mourning, a dish that never grows cold, is the subtext of "I See You Everywhere," but it is only part of the feast. Rich, intricate and alive with emotion, the book reconstructs the complicated bonds between Louisa and Clem, making neither sister a villain, neither a hero. Clem calls Louisa's "worst" side "the Judge. À la Salem witchcraft trials," but it's Clem who emerges as the more philosophical of the pair - sense (however harum-scarum) to Louisa's sensibility. "I wonder sometimes what kind of sisters we'll be when we're ancient (if we ever are)" Clem reflects, after a volatile summer the two spend in Vermont, dividing the spoils of a maiden aunt's household. "Ever notice how sisters, when they aren't best friends, make particularly vicious enemies?" From her work in the wild, Clem has learned to disbelieve the notion of fairness in nature. "Altruism? A myth. Share? Oh please." Again and again, Glass reveals Louisa's envy in all its colors - flinging a glass of wine in Clem's face when she thinks Clem has stolen her lover (she hasn't), eyeing her younger sister suspiciously when she comes to visit Louisa and her new man. Even when Louisa gets breast cancer and calls Clem for consolation, she doesn't trust her sister's good will. "God, Lou. Don't you think I want you to have what you want?" Clem asks. "You're my sister," Louisa touchily responds. "You're supposed to want those things for me," but she continues doubting. It's the little sister who's the mature one; the elder sister has trouble wishing her sibling the happiness that has eluded her. Clem's life has a "beautiful arc," Louisa grudgingly acknowledges. Does that mean her own life doesn't? She fears this may be the case, despising herself for her pettiness, unable to overcome it. Does this make her a less worthy person, a less worthy woman, than Clem? IN "I See You Everywhere," Glass follows the structure she used for "Three Junes," dividing the book into signal moments in the sisters' lives and alternating narrators, Rashomon-style, to permit each sister to cast her joint and separate experience from her own perspective. There's more authenticity to Louisa's voice than to Clem's, which is understandable since Clem's is projected and assembled, while Louisa's is drawn from the author's picture-perfect internal archive. Reassembling the sisters' shared past, Louisa thinks, "the whole thing comes together like a jigsaw puzzle. ... Put the edge together first, then work your way toward the center, organizing the pieces into groups by color and, within color, by shape. A few rows in, you see that it's going to get much easier - it has to - because you're finding the right place for each piece faster and faster." In this novel, Glass has used the edges and color blocks of her own life to build an honest portrait of sister-love and sister-hate - interlocking, brave and forgiving - made whole through art, despite missing pieces in life. "There are many kinds of memorial and memento which bring us closer to those who are far away and those who have departed," Goethe wrote in "Elective Affinities," "but none is more meaningful than the portrait. ... You have the pleasant feeling that you are divided, and yet can never be separated." Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Guardian Review
In her third novel, Glass tracks the lives of two American sisters from 1980 to 2005. Hailing from "a large, tenaciously Confederate clan", the sisters are "as different as white chocolate and seaweed". Louisa is a prickly, brainy urbanite; her younger sibling Clementine a vital, captivating adventurer. Louisa gives up her hopes of being an artist and moves to New York to work for a magazine. Clementine is an environmentalist constantly travelling between jobs and lovers. Although the narrative is split between both sisters' points of view, the book is essentially about Lou's perception of Clem: their mother's favourite and (seemingly) more at ease in her own skin than Louisa will ever be. As grim as their troubles become, it is difficult to fully sympathise with the sisters. Almost every character in the book is improbably articulate, and the story is insulated by a reflective, soft-focus style that manages to be gooey and po-faced at the same time. But it is expertly written in its way, and oddly compelling - like a slushy movie you can't help but respond to. Caption: article-paperback1.1 In her third novel, Glass tracks the lives of two American sisters from 1980 to 2005. Hailing from "a large, tenaciously Confederate clan", the sisters are "as different as white chocolate and seaweed". Louisa is a prickly, brainy urbanite; her younger sibling Clementine a vital, captivating adventurer. - Ben Jeffery.
Kirkus Review
The comforting and alienating effects of family closeness are portrayed with appealing warmth and wit in the third novel from the Massachusetts author (The Whole World Over, 2006, etc.). It's a tale of two sisters: city mouse Louisa Jardine, who shapes a career and an erratic love life out of her experience in New York City's art world, and her younger sibling Clement, an ever-itinerant wildlife biologist committed only to "a wild and freewheeling life, a life of pick up and go." In juxtaposed chapters narrated by both women, we're privy to their mutually loving and dependent, and frequently combative, relationship over a 25-year period that begins when Louisa comes home to Vermont following the death of their nearly centenarian great-aunt Lucy, a free spirit whose intelligent independence has been a touchstone for both "Clem's" adventurous peregrinations and Louisa's vacillating movements toward and away from marriage and motherhood. Their mother May, a wealthy horsewoman and breeder of dogs who also manages her passive husband and influences her daughters more than they'll admit, provides the fulcrum that keeps bringing the sisters together even when they appear to have become irreparably estranged. Glass shares Anne Tyler's gift for comic plotting as a means to reveal character under stress, but a graver note is struck by her understanding of Louisa's frustrating, enervating mood swings. The arc of the novel in fact isn't comic, and its elegiac denouement and conclusion are immensely moving. There are arguably too many echoes of the patterns and emphases of Glass's NBA-winning Three Junes, but this novel digs deeperparticularly in its rich characterization of the mercurial Clem. She's as sentient and soulful as she is wayward and irritating, and we understand why men are drawn to her flame, then burn up in the intensity of her embracing orbit. Not a great novel, but a good one, and a promising extension of Glass's already impressive range. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
National Book Awardr winner Glass (Three Junes) tells here of sisters Clem and Louisa, whose differing interpretations of each others' lives, loves, and losses are masterfully conveyed through the narration, voiced alternately by the author and actress Mary Stuart Masterson. These two accomplished readers make the sisters' varying experiences and memories sound like a conversation at the kitchen table. Recommended for public and academic libraries. [Audio clips available through library.booksontape.com and www.randomhouse.com/audio; the review of the Pantheon hc advised that "public libraries.buy on demand," LJ 8/08.-Ed.]-Beth Traylor, Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libs. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Swim to the Middle 1980 I avoid reunions. I'm not a rebel, a recluse, or a sociopath, and I'm too young to qualify as a crank, even if it's true that I just spent the evening of my twenty-fifth birthday not carousing with friends or drinking champagne at a candlelit table for two but resolutely alone and working, glazing a large ovoid porcelain bowl while listening to Ella Fitzgerald sing songs by the Gershwin brothers. (A crank could never love Gershwin.) My one real boyfriend in college, just before we broke up, told me I'm nostalgic to a fault. He professed contempt for what he called "the delusional sound track to our parents' deluded lives." He informed me that you can't be nostalgic for things that had their heyday before you were so much as born. Just about any member of my family would have laughed him out the door and down the garden path. Family reunions are the worst--all that competition disguised as fellowship--and they're also the hardest to avoid. But when my father's Great-Aunt Lucy died last summer, there was an inheritance at stake, a collection of antique jewelry. Not the glossy priceless stuff--no diamonds, tiaras, or niagaras of pearls. Not things you'd sell but things so deliciously old-fashioned and stylish that to wear them makes you feel like a character from a Jane Austen novel or a Chekhov play. The one piece I remembered most vividly was a cameo, two inches square, ivory on steel-blue Pacific coral, a woman's face inclined toward her hand, in her slender fingers an iris. Aunt Lucy had worn that cameo day and night, winter and summer, on lace and wool. Maybe she'd left us a charm bracelet, maybe earrings of garnet or Mexican silver, but mostly I wondered about that cameo. And wanted it. I'd wanted it since I was a little girl. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on Lucy's lap, squirming to find a comfortable spot on her bony thighs yet happy to feel her kind honeyed voice in my hair as she talked with the other grown-ups gathered on her porch. She did not object to my poking and fingering the cameo, probing its fragile details: the woman's eyelids and earlobes, the cuticles of her nails, the harmoniously wandering tendrils of her hair. She let me borrow it once, for a family dinner at a country inn. Because Lucy never had children, not even a husband, my father long ago became the one who kept an eye on her in the last decades of her very long life. Geographically, he was the closest family member by far; out of a large, tenaciously Confederate clan, they were the only two living anywhere you can count on snow. Once Dad decided to stay north, after earning two degrees at Harvard, the family lumped him together with Lucy: "How are the defectas faring up yonda?" a cousin might ask Dad at a wedding in Memphis or Charleston. Happily, their proximity blossomed into genuine affection. So Dad was the executor of Lucy's will, which emerged from her bureau drawer along with a letter to my father that she'd written a year before she died. It began, To my splendid grandnephew Beauchance: Before I take my irreversible leave (which I suppose I will now have taken, strange to think), I am seizing this lucid moment to write down a few matters pertaining to the house and my ragbag possessions therein. I have little doubt that I shall have left the house in a rather sorry state, for which I apologize. Be charitable, if you can, to any bats or raccoons which may have colonized the attic or basement (though none to my knowledge have done so), and please take Sonny's word on any tasks for which he claims I still owe him payment; our mutual accounting has grown slack if not capricious. . . . Over the phone, Dad read me the letter in its crisp yet meandering entirety, stopping now and then to chuckle. I heard no tears in his voice until the end, where she wrote, Whatever modest adornments pass for jewelry, I leave to your daughters, Louisa and Clement. I did not become as intimately acquainted with them as I would have liked, but I did know the satisfaction, one summer to the next, of seeing how they grew; as I wish I had seen you evolve in your youth. I wish I had known much sooner, Beau, that you would become the facsimile of a perfect son, a gift whose pleasures I wish I had been blessed to know firsthand. His voice cracked on the word gift , as if he didn't deserve such gratitude, my father who will do just about anything for anyone, driving my mother crazy with all the favors he does for everyone else (including, as she likes to say, any random citizen of Outer Slobovia and its most godforsaken suburbs). I decided to fly across the entire country because I couldn't bear the thought that if I didn't show up in person, my sister might inherit everything--including that cameo--by default. On the plane, I tried to decide which of two equally vulgar motives, materialism or spite, had compelled me to buy a ticket I couldn't afford to a place where I'd see no one I wanted to see. My life was not, as people like to say, in a good place--though, ironically, the place where I lived at the time happened to be Santa Barbara. So I made excuses and timed my visit to avoid the masses of cousins, aunts, and uncles who would descend on Lucy's house to grope the heirlooms by day and drink too much bourbon by night. I may share their Huguenot blood, but not their bad taste in booze and their glutinous drawl. I will never forget how, when our grandmother died two years ago, the family marauded her New Orleans house with no more respect than the Union soldiers who stripped us all bare a century back. You'd think, with all our costly educations, the reconstructed Jardines would avoid civil wars. Well, ha. There was an ugly brawl, which featured weeping and a smashed lamp, over the Steinway grand. Someone with Solomonic intentions actually went so far as to crank up a chainsaw. I could not deal with that type of gathering all over again. Whether I could deal with Clem remained to be seen. My sister had been living with Aunt Lucy for what proved to be her final summer. After Lucy's death, Clem stayed on while the relatives passed through, finishing up her summer jobs before heading back to college for her junior year. During the days, Clem worked in a bike shop and volunteered at a sanctuary for recovering raptors: birds, she'd explained when I called, that had been shot, struck by small planes, tortured by teenage boys. In the evenings, she kept an eye on Lucy--until her sudden death at the beginning of August. Not that our aunt was infirm, incontinent, or witless, but for the last several months of her life she was afflicted with an obstinate restlessness that sent her out after dark on urgent eccentric missions. Winooski, Vermont, is a snug, friendly place, so she wasn't likely to be mugged or abducted. Nevertheless, reasoned Dad, who could say she wouldn't do something drastic like sell her last shares of Monsanto and Kodak, head for the airport, and unintentionally vanish? I'd hardly spoken to Clem since moving out west two years before. After college, in pursuit of a man I'd prefer to jettison from memory, I hauled my pottery wheel, my heart, and my disastrously poor judgment from Providence to California. It was completely unlike me to do anything so rash; maybe, subconsciously, I was trying to get back at Clem by pretending to be Clem, to annoy her by stealing her role as devil-may-care adventuress. Whatever the reason for my tempestuous act, it backfired. Three weeks after I signed a lease and bought a secondhand kiln, the boyfriend shed me like a stifling, scratchy-collared coat. To keep up with the rent I'd fooled myself into thinking he would share, I gave up my car. After that, I sold a pitcher here, a platter there, but to stave off eviction I wrote articles for a magazine that told workaholic doctors what to do with their leisure time. In college, I'd been just as good with words as I was with clay, and one of my Brit-lit classmates had started this odd publication. People had laughed, but subscriptions to Doc's Holiday sold like deodorant soap. Thus did I hold starvation at bay, but I also felt like the work kept me stuck in a place where I ought to love living but didn't. Everything out there unnerved me: the punk shadows of palm trees slashing the lawns, the sun setting--not rising--over the ocean, the solitude of the sidewalks as I rushed everywhere on foot, carless and stared at. My inner compass refused to budge. North! it kept urging me. East! I'd just come to the conclusion that I didn't belong there and never would, and I was feeling uncomfortable in my work, both kinds, but I had no intention of letting Clem in on my angst. My plan was never to trust her again, never to fall for her charms the way everyone else, especially men, seemed to do so fervently. And to snare that cameo. Maybe a string of pearls. Oh, Glenn Miller. I love him, too. What's life without a little delusion? • If you're to hear Louisa's version of what went on last summer, you will also be hearing mine. Louisa's worst side is the one I call the Judge. À la Salem witchcraft trials. There's this look she gets on her face that tells the world and everyone in it how completely unworthy it and they are to contain or witness her presence. Beware! says that look. The Spanish Inquisition was Entenmann's Danish! Her new life in Santa Ladeedabra did not seem to have mellowed her out one iota, because when I pulled up at the airport, that's the look she was wearing, firm as a church hat, beaming her world-weary scorn clear across the state of Vermont. I was late, okay, which didn't help. It didn't help either, I know, that it was me picking her up. I wonder sometimes what kind of sisters we'll be when we're ancient (if we ever are). Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine: before that visit, you'd have bet the hacienda we'd end up like them. Cold? Suspicious? Resentful? Ever notice how sisters, when they aren't best friends, make particularly vicious enemies? Like, they could be enemies from the time they lay their beady little eyes on each other, maybe because their mother makes them rivals or maybe because there's not enough love to go around and--not out of greed but from the gut, like two hawks zeroing in on a wren--they have no choice but to race for it. (Laws of nature, pure and simple. Be vigilant and survive. Altruism? A myth. Share? Oh please. Whatever it is that feeds the hunger, dive-bomb first, philosophize later.) Or maybe they grow apart in a more conscious way, maybe because their marriages clash: the guys they choose see each other as losers or sellouts; the women are helplessly loyal. But that's not our story. No husbands yet, not even a hint of husband. I've always been the favorite--our mother's, at least. Partly, it's the animal thing: Mom grew up on a storybook farm where animals ruled life more strictly than clocks. And I happen to be the one who set my sights that way. Saving animals is all I've ever wanted to do. In fourth grade, I asked Mom to give me all her shoe boxes. A hospital: that was the plan. I cut windows in the ends of the boxes and stacked them in the bottom of my closet like high-rise condos. My first baby bird got the penthouse. Next day, he was dead. They almost always die, I'd learn. But that didn't stop me. "You're my daughter, all right," said Mom when she saw what I'd built (though her tone made me wonder if the likeness was such a good thing). Louisa thinks this makes my life easy--being the favorite. She doesn't realize that once you're the disappointment, or once you've chosen a path seen as odd or unchoosable, your struggle is over, right? On the other side of the fence--mine--every expectation you fulfill (or look like you might, on purpose or not) puts you one step higher and closer to that Grand Canyon rim from which you could one day rule the world--or plummet in very grand style. • In the car, I let Clem do the talking. She was late to pick me up, and I was glad: it gave me a reason to sulk until I could get my bearings. I was glad to be back in New England, but I was cross-eyed with fatigue. I cannot sleep on planes. So Clem filled me in on the reading of the will and what she called the Great Divide: relatives clutching lists, drawing lots, swarming the house like fire ants. But this time there were no dogfights; everyone, said Clem, remembered the piano brawl. I hadn't seen the place in five years, and when we arrived, I just stood on the walk and stared. It's a Victorian, more aspiring than grand, and it had always looked a little anemic, but now it was a wreck. The sallow paint, formerly white, hung off the clapboards in broad curling tongues, and the blue porch ceiling bore the crusty look of a cave complete with stalactites. The flagstones were fringed with moss. The front steps sagged. That the lawn had just been mowed made the house look even more derelict. "How could Dad let her live this way?" I asked. Excerpted from I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
