Showing results by narrator "John Thorndike" in All Categories

In real life Virginia Thorndike, the author’s mother, died of a drug and alcohol overdose at the age of 57. In this novel she recovers and fights to stay clean. Her son Rob drives her home from rehab, pours her gin and wine onto the lawn and clears her house of all drugs. Her older son Jamie and his gay lover Miles also come to help, but after Miles is diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, Ginny must face her recovery alone through a cold and quiet winter. When Rob’s wife runs off, leaving him to care for their one-year-old twins, Ginny moves in with them.

Virginia and Joe Thorndike have been married for 22 years, and now she's in love with a surgeon 13 years her junior. She leaves her husband and flies to Miami to start living with Rich Villamano, but there he tells her he has changed his mind and they must go their own ways. She takes off in his car, heading north with no luggage, no hope, no destination. She buys a bottle of gin and drinks it straight. Afraid that she’ll kill herself or someone else on the road, she abandons the car, flies to New York and takes an airport hotel room. She has no home and nowhere to go.

In the spring of 1956, a young American photographer falls in love with a Cuban line cook in New York. They have a 10-week affair that ends when Immigration arrests and deports him, and by then Clare Miller is pregnant. Few Americans know the name Camilo Cienfuegos. All Cubans do. He was the most charismatic of Castro’s rebel commanders. But Clare, who never hears from him after he’s deported, believes he has died in Fidel’s invasion of the island.

In the face of a mysterious and terrifying illness, this is the story of a family trying to maintain some kind of togetherness. Torn between his commitment to keep Clarisa a part of Janir’s life and the threat she poses to that life, John acknowledges that he can care for his son in ways he never could for Clarisa. All who have experienced the wrench of mental illness in the family will recognize their own journey in this heartfelt story of fatherhood.