Book Review / "I Meant to Tell You" by Fran Hawthorne

I Meant to Tell You by Fran Hawthorne

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"How many secrets could a marriage survive?” Miranda Isaacs asks herself this question when she faces a situation where she isn’t yet married but already a liar. Still, although the fact that she hasn’t been open with her fiancée is undeniable, she can’t reconcile with being called a liar. What she hadn’t told the man she plans to marry could have never surfaced at all. If he hadn’t been aiming at the job of his dreams in the U.S. attorney’s office, he and those close to him wouldn’t have been subjected to the strictest check. Alas, such checks are performed by high-class professionals from whom you can’t hide a needle in a haystack, let alone an arrest for child kidnapping.

“How many arrests could a marriage survive?" Miranda asks herself next. But before she can submit to despair – with her upcoming marriage being a fraction from cancelling and the man she loves requesting they take a break – she is drawn into the whirlpool of family secrets her mother had been keeping from her all three decades of her life.

“Forever nineteen and a half. Itching to rev the engine and join the Revolution. Summer of 1968, so he would’ve been heading to Chicago, to the big demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention.” This is the image Miranda has of her father whom she’d never met. The father who died when she was six months old. The father whom her mom has raised her to worship as a hero.

I won’t lie: most of all, I enjoyed the story of Miranda’s parents. I’ve always been fascinated by family secrets that get uncovered by unsuspecting descendants. And the story of Judith and Jerry, living their youth during the turbulent epoch of the 60s in America, is absolutely fascinating.
I couldn’t really relate to Miranda, for the reasons why she lied to her fiancée didn’t become clear to me. But I found it extremely intriguing to follow her – often erratic and unreasonable – actions while she desperately tried to sort out the troubles in her own life and come to terms with revelations about her parents.

In "I Meant to Tell You" by Fran Hawthorne, timelines and characters’ lives interweave, making the reader look at the events from different angles and reassess them as they read on. The settings – New York of the 60s and Washington of the 2000s – came alive on the pages for me. I walked the streets of New York with protesters against the war in Vietnam and trudged the alleys in the US capital with anti-Iraq war demonstrators, feeling how similar every generation’s aspirations and worries are.



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I Meant to Tell You