Buy This Book: Sometimes Mine by Martha Moody

There’s a very interesting question posed in Martha Moody’s third novel, Sometimes Mine. What happens in mid life if the man you’ve loved for eleven years, the one with whom you have made a quasi-retirement plan, a plan that means you’ll have someone to grow old with, falls seriously ill? And what if you aren’t the wife of this man, but his mistress about whom his wife knows nothing? At least not yet. As you might imagine, these are very fine ingredients for a delicious fiction stew. Especially given Martha Moody’s gift for developing perspective. Genie Toledo is the ‘other woman’, a highly successful, articulate, often wryly funny cardiologist, the divorced single parent of a grown daughter who has maintained an eleven-year affair with an equally successful college basketball coach, Mick Crabb. Genie and Mick meet routinely every Thursday at the same hotel. Some might find it odd, but a weekly date and the nebulous notion of an idyllic future together in later life, after Mick’s kids are grown, are enough for Genie. She’s that good at compartmentalizing and dissociating, that good, as well, at keeping a distance between herself and her emotions and those whom she cares for. Her daughter and best friend, for instance. She’s that good at maintaining control of the circumstances of her life and she believes that she’s relatively content, too, with all that she’s created--until Mick falls ill and then everything, including Genie’s faith in herself and how she has chosen to live her life, goes out the window.


In the aftermath of Mick’s diagnosis, Genie can’t any longer pretend the fantasy world she has constructed will withstand the harsher demand of reality. Not even Genie can avoid the ineluctability of truth. So what can be made of this new world, when it’s no longer up to you when or even if you meet the one you love? And what of love? Can it be true that it isn’t necessary to schedule it, limit it, confine it? Sometimes Mine is a deeply thoughtful story where everything that occurs isn’t on the surface and endings might not quite tie up into a nice, neat bow. For more on Martha and her other (excellent) books visit her website.