Finished audio 10-22-09, rating 4.5/5, fiction, pub. 2008

Narrated by Susan Ericksen

If you knew that your marriage would end in a divorce party 35 years later, would you still go through with it?  What’s the distance between staying and walking away?  Gwyn and Thomas are part of the Hampton elite, rich, beautiful, two kids, grandchild on the way, and they are getting divorced because Thomas has found Buddhism.  Or is this true?

Their son, Nate and his fiancee, Maggie begin the day of the divorce party at home in Brooklyn with secrets of their own that only get more complicated once they arrive in Long Island.  Maggie is about to meet Nate’s parents for the first time at a party she can’t quite come to terms with.  And Nate has kept his immense wealth from her.  Why and is there more he’s not saying?

I love books and movies about marriages.  The happy, the sad, the damaged.  There is something so complicated about this relationship and no two are ever the same.  Gwyn is facing the end of her marriage, but there is still something there, love or hope, or both.  And Maggie is faced with a future husband who is willing to keep the most basic truths about himself a secret from her.  The chapters alternated between the two women and I loved it.  It was thoughtful and thought-provoking, meaningful and sad and I could not stop listening until it was done. 

I have to be in the right mood for a book like this, but if you are I think you will really take something away.  I was totally caught up in the lives of Gwyn and Maggie for 6 hours and I wouldn’t have missed a minute of the Divorce Party. 

I checked this audio book out of the library.