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by: Anna Quindlen
List Price: $13.95Amazon.com's Price: $11.16 You Save: $2.79 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780812976182
ISBN: 0812976185
Label: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Manufacturer: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: August 08, 2006
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Release Date: August 08, 2006
Sales Rank: 45674
Studio: Random House Trade Paperbacks
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
A mother. A daughter. A shattering choice.
From Anna Quindlen, bestselling author of Black and Blue, comes a novel of life, love and everyday acts of mercy.
'A triumph.'
--San Francisco Chronicle
From the Paperback edition.
Amazon.com Review:
One True Thing is a film starring Meryl Streep as the cancer-stricken homemaker mother, Renee Zellweger as the daughter who quits her top-dog job to care for her, and William Hurt as the chilly professor who lets the women in the family do the heavy emotional lifting dying requires. But the real star of the project remains former New York Times everyday-life columnist Anna Quindlen, who quit her top-dog job to write novels (and who took time off from college to nurse her own dying mother).
Quindlen hit a nerve with One True Thing, which captures an experience seldom dealt with in popular culture. (One exception: the sensitive 1996 film with Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio of the play Marvin's Room.) Though the heroine of One True Thing, Ellen Gulden, is a golden girl with two brothers who'll lose her career the instant she steps off the fast track, society concurs with her dad, who says, 'It seems to me another woman is what's wanted here.'
The book is a mother-daughter tale that should please fans of, say, The Joy Luck Club. It's not flashy, but it has a deep feel for the way children often discover, just before it's too late, who their parents really are. 'Our parents are never people to us,' Ellen writes, 'they're always character traits.... There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.' The mercy-killing subplot isn't gripping, but the palpable sense of deepening family intimacy certainly is. --Tim Appelo
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Great story...
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. It was so well written and engaging that I couldn't put it down nor did I want it to end.
Rating: - On True Thing
This is one of my new favorite books. After seeing the movie (starring Meryl Streep) I was intrigued to get more "invovled" with her character. The book did not disappoint in the least. Great read.
Rating:  - Out of all of the ways I have tried to deal with my father's death, reading this book was the most therapeutic
This book was so therapeutic to me after losing my father to cancer 8 years ago. It brought back so many memories, but it really hit the nail on the head when it talks about the"dying with dignity" issue. My father was so well known in the community, and such a pillar of strength to us family members, that none of us really knew how to deal with the fact that we now had to be the pillars of strength for him. It is hard to see how debilitating cancer can be on a loved one, but nobody portrays this ... Read More
Rating: - Tight, fluid, moving
A few things touched me especially deeply as I read this finely crafted novel by Anna Quindlen. One is how easily this situation could occur for any of us and second is the curiosity of how I would handle the situation and third is, how much do we really know about the innerworkings of the relationships of the people around us, even closest to us?
This novel of family, of life, of death and of choices surrounding life and death invites you into the intimate family circle of Ellen - an ... Read More
Rating: - Very gripping, and layered book
I checked this book out from the library with a vague recollection that it had been the basis for a movie a number of years back. Once I started reading it, I virtually devoured it- I was finished with it in less than three days. I kept in in my briefcase to read everytime I got a moment to do so.
This book is not just a story, it is many. It's a book about facing the deterioration of a loved one from a terminal illness. It's a study in family dynamics, as Ellen examines the relationship ... Read More
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