TUESDAY POTPOURRI: INTROS/TEASERS – “YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN”

 

 

 

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, from Tuesday/First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by Should Be Reading.

Today’s featured book is You Should Have Known, by Jean Hanff Korelitz.

 

 

 

Intro:  (Chapter One:  You Just Know)

Usually people cried when they came here for the first time, and this girl looked as if she’d be no exception.  She walked in with a briefcase and a swagger and shook Grace’s hand like the cool professional she clearly was, or at least wished to be.  Then she sat on the couch and crossed one long twill-encased leg over the other.  And then, sort of abruptly, she seemed to register where she was, with a wallop.

“Oh wow,” said the girl, whose name—Grace had double-checked a few minutes earlier—was Rebecca Wynne.  “I haven’t been in a therapist’s office since college.”

Grace sat in her customary chair, crossed her own much shorter legs, and leaned forward.  She couldn’t help it.

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Teaser:  Grace nodded.  Doubts emerged often in her practice:  very old, dessicated doubts, saved and preserved and brought forth by very wounded, very sad women.  They were a theme with countless variations:  I knew he drank too much.  I knew he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.  I knew he didn’t love me, not as much as I loved him. (p. 16)

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Amazon Description:  Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself, devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son, Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice. Grace is also the author of the forthcoming You Should Have Known, a book in which she castigates women for not valuing their intuition and calls upon them to pay attention to their first impressions of men.

But weeks before the book is published, a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only a chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.

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Would you keep reading?  I am a sucker for books about human flaws and frailties, and about the therapists who try to help their patients.  Call if years of working with broken families.

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