Review: It's A Terrible Disease, But It Looks Good On Me
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 10, 2012
I loved this novel. I loved the central character. I didn't think it was too long. Or boring. I thought it was warm, and funny, and it touched my emotions. It spoke to every fantasy I've ever had about just chucking this boring, unfulfiling life and running off to find something better.Unfortunately, it reminded me  of the old story or joke about the medical researcher who was infected with a terrible wasting disease he'd been working to cure, and looking at his wasted features in the mirror, said, "But on me, it looks good."Mara Jane Mulligan is an almost-40 Goodwife, a woman who loves her college sweetheart husband, her teen son, her life of housework and buying tissue in bulk quantities and always doing what's expected.Until one night while treating herself to a wonderful bubble bath to get out of a freakishly unusual funk, she runs out of the miraculous liquid and can't find it in any stores open that late at night.She's alone, her son off on a month's visit, her husband away. And she MUST find the elixir for her bath. So when she hears it can be found in nearby Vancouver Canada, only a couple of hours away, what's wrong with hopping into your car and crossing national borders to get more of it?Even if that trip leads her to running away from her husband and family, "just a one-month vacation from my life", living under the name of Mara, finding a new job and new friends and maybe a new career,  making friends with some very appealing lesbians and older women who go to male strip shows and talk about lovers they had in the past while cheating on their husbands. But they're all good people.And meeting a gorgeous single guy who quite clearly wants to compromise her virtue and for the rest of the month lightly treading the fine line between flirting and falling into bed with her new male friend.Of course, husband Dan who shows up to try to spoil her month-long vacation away from him has to be a MAN. Worse, a HUSBAND. That's oblivious and controlling and unable to understand why a woman would need a month away from family and responsibilities and the chance to flirt with a gorgeous new hunk.In one way this is a realistic romantic comedy, and in another it's a fantasy. Plenty of people - in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond break out of the mold of their current lives and try to resurrect old dreams.The fantasy element is that old dependable, oblivious,  controlling Dan (SPOILER WARNING)somehow finds it in him to change, to love Mara Jane and give her the freedom to spread her new wings.The fantasy part is that another word for "DO-OVER" is DIVORCE. Most of the time when women, or men, decide to take a month long vacation from their spouses, refuse to come home, and get very cozy with a friend of the opposite sex, the ending is not a teary reconciliation. It's a guy or woman delivering legal papers.As a man and a died-in-the-wool romantic, I can cheer for Mara to find a new and better life.On the other hand, noting that this is a romance and romances are written by women, for women, and sell to women, I wonder a little how Mara Jane would have reacted if olddependable Dan had run off to Vancouver, said he was going to spend a month enjoying a break from matrimony, joined up with old friends in a bar band and started reliving the glories of his college days? And refused to consider going back to his job to help pay the mortgage on the family homestead. In other words, started thinking about and looking out for NUMBER ONE - Himself.Guys do that too, and I find it hard to see many women cheering a husband that would abandon a wife and child and a job to find himself!It's kind of a funny thought, actually because every male in the universe knows how women react to a man who does something like that. And it's not pretty.So, I loved the book. I love the character. And I love the ending. And I wonder deep down how good a person Mara Jane is to let her dull old husband who had made one last effort to hold on to her see her in a clinch with her new guy.I still gave it five stars. I just don't know that I would have given Mara Jane a second chance.