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Ellen in Pieces
In this witty, compelling and genre-bending novel, a single mother navigates the loves, lusts and losses of middle age to arrive at a final, bittersweet contentment.
Ellen McGinty: sexy, impulsive, loud-mouthed, chock full of regrets. In middle age she sells the house she raised her daughters in, slips off the shell of her old life, and steps out for a first, tentative foray into real contentment--directly into the path of a man twenty years her junior. Her story explodes into multiple points of view. Through the eyes of her lover, Matt, her ex-husband, Larry, her two daughters (one a former addict), her grandson, and a friend who both supports and betrays her, we watch Ellen negotiate the middle years of her tumultuous life as the pieces of who she is finally come together. In its entirety, Ellen in Pieces explores love in its varied forms, the nature of regret (and the possibility of recovery from it), and that greatest human test, mortality.
Exquisitely written, absorbing and intelligent, this new novel by Caroline Adderson shows her at the top of her form. Ellen in Pieces is a deeply affecting story, an emotional mirror for all our lives.
Ellen McGinty: sexy, impulsive, loud-mouthed, chock full of regrets. In middle age she sells the house she raised her daughters in, slips off the shell of her old life, and steps out for a first, tentative foray into real contentment--directly into the path of a man twenty years her junior. Her story explodes into multiple points of view. Through the eyes of her lover, Matt, her ex-husband, Larry, her two daughters (one a former addict), her grandson, and a friend who both supports and betrays her, we watch Ellen negotiate the middle years of her tumultuous life as the pieces of who she is finally come together. In its entirety, Ellen in Pieces explores love in its varied forms, the nature of regret (and the possibility of recovery from it), and that greatest human test, mortality.
Exquisitely written, absorbing and intelligent, this new novel by Caroline Adderson shows her at the top of her form. Ellen in Pieces is a deeply affecting story, an emotional mirror for all our lives.
336 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 19, 2014
14 people are currently reading
1691 people want to read
About the author
Caroline Adderson
55 books78 followersCaroline Adderson grew up in Alberta. After traveling around Canada, she moved to B.C. to go to university and has mostly lived there ever since. She started writing seriously after university, eventually going on to write two internationally published novels (A History of Forgetting and Sitting Practice) and two collections of short stories for adults (Bad Imaginings and Pleased To Meet You). When her son was five, she began writing seriously unserious books for young readers (Very Serious Children; I, Bruno;and Bruno For Real). Her contribution to the Single Voice series is her first really serious book for young readers and her first book for teens.
Caroline’s work has received numerous prize nominations including the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. A two-time Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and three-time CBC Literary Award winner, Caroline was also the recipient of the 2006 Marian Engel Award, given annually to an outstanding female writer in mid-career in recognition of her body of work. She also won the 2009 Diamond Willow Award—voted on by lots of nice kids in Saskatchewan—for her children’s novel Very Serious Children.
Caroline keeps writing for readers of all ages every day. She also does a little teaching at Simon Fraser University and hangs out with her husband, a filmmaker, their 10-year-old son, and their naughty dog, Mickey, a Jack Russell terrier who is very lucky to be cute or she would never get away with all she does. Caroline’s advice to young writers is to read, read, read and write, write, write, and never get a Jack Russell terrier.
Caroline’s work has received numerous prize nominations including the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. A two-time Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and three-time CBC Literary Award winner, Caroline was also the recipient of the 2006 Marian Engel Award, given annually to an outstanding female writer in mid-career in recognition of her body of work. She also won the 2009 Diamond Willow Award—voted on by lots of nice kids in Saskatchewan—for her children’s novel Very Serious Children.
Caroline keeps writing for readers of all ages every day. She also does a little teaching at Simon Fraser University and hangs out with her husband, a filmmaker, their 10-year-old son, and their naughty dog, Mickey, a Jack Russell terrier who is very lucky to be cute or she would never get away with all she does. Caroline’s advice to young writers is to read, read, read and write, write, write, and never get a Jack Russell terrier.
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January 23, 2015
Caroline Adderson’s Ellen in Pieces is the novel we’ve all been waiting for. Me, because I’ve been reading pieces of Ellen in Pieces in journals and magazines for the last few years, and hearing rumours they’d culminate in an actual book, and how often are one’s longings so perfectly satisfied? And you’ve been waiting for this book, because I promise that it’s one of the best you’ll read this year. Devastating, wonderful and brilliant. Because aren’t you always looking for a book to apply such adjectives to? Because I’ve been longing to read this book for years, and when I did, it was even better than I’d hoped.
It’s a novel in stories, or a collection of linked stories, or maybe a novel comprised of fragments, which is more like a life is than most novels I’ve ever read. The first three “chapters,” I’d read previously, and through which I’d become entranced with Adderson’s character, Ellen McGinty, divorced, determined, blundering, flawed, impulsive, hated, and loved. Because it’s rare to encounter such a character in fiction, a woman in the middle years of her life, a woman who is not a type, who has history, is unsure of what to do with her present, who has a body, experiences lust, gets tired, loves her children, cannot stand her children, has friends, fights with her friends, who is herself with such remarkable specificity—”Ellenish” is a term applied at one point in the book, and I knew exactly what they meant. It is rare that a character is so vividly realized—so familiar and yet utterly original at once.
Caroline Adderson pays attention to words, which are as specific as her characters. No one else would write a sentence like, “A melting weakness overtook her and she remembered all those years ago, not here but in Ellen’s North Vancouver kitchen, how he glissaded out of the way so Georgia could set down her platter of blintzes.” A platter of blintzes—has there ever been such a thing? The world reinvented through Adderson’s extraordinary, euphonic vocabulary.
In the first chapter, “I Feel Lousy”, Ellen discover that her younger daughter, not even the disappointing one, is pregnant, which evokes memories of her own troubled past, an accidental pregnancy with her ex-husband, the terrible, awful burden of motherhood, single motherhood in particular, and the lengths that a mother will go to—this mother in particular—for her daughter’s sake. “Poppycock” finds us a few years into the future, Ellen’s estranged father on her doorstep, obviously suffering from some kind of malady and she’s horrified to find him but also bowled over because he wants her, he needs her. She’d assumed her family had written her off altogether since she’d tried to sleep with her brother-in-law at her father’s 50th birthday years before. But the past, just like the present, turns out to be more complicated than that, and the reappearance of her father is a gift that comes with a shadow, a particularly long one.
And if you think that ending is devastating, read “Ellen-Celine, Celine-Ellen” next, about Ellen and her two friends whose relationship was forged at pre-natal class years ago, Ellen all alone because her asshole husband Larry had just abandoned her (the first time). The three stay close in the decades to follow, Ellen and Celine taking a trip to Europe together, which is ill-advised, so say their other friend, Georgia, and also Ellen’s hairdresser, Tony, because Ellen and Celine spend much of their friendship not being able to stand each other, a situated not mitigated by their strong personalities, and also that of the three friends who’d met in pre-natal class, it had been Celine’s baby that died.
Have I conveyed that these stories of death and crisis, all the drama of a life, are also funny? Adderson portrays human behaviour at the intersection of heroism and buffoonery, or else just irritability, to much effect. There’s a subtlety at work here. There are lines that are going to come along and break your heart.
The next few stories are more concerned with the present, pieces fitting more closely together. Ellen begins to find herself—her daughters are settling down, or else calming down; she sells her house; she takes up pottery again; after years of searching, she is learning to be present. She also starts sleeping with a young man who is her daughters’ age, which doesn’t hurt. She thinks she’s beginning to get over her ex-husband, Larry, whose desertion has wrung her heart for years and years.
One chapter is from the point of view of Matt, Ellen’s young lover, who is using Ellen to escape from his own troubled domestic situation. Another by Ellen’s older daughter, Mimi, who has overcome her problems with addiction but is still searching for something to hold onto, and still running from her mother too, whose presence is still vividly felt even from halfway across the country in Toronto, currently in the midst of a garbage strike. (Mimi traces back most of her problems to having once discovered her mother in bed with her grade-five teacher, whom she’d been in love with. Until that point.) Another word in this chapter, “orrery”, which recurs at the end of the story as Mimi rolls down a car window using a similar device. “She saw the moon, the faint stars vying for attention against the glare of human habitation. Pluto was up there somewhere, that small cold outcast planet far away. But there were people who still believed in it, people who wished it well.”
If the story doesn’t devastate you, I promise that the prose will.
At the end of this chapter, Mimi finally gets an inkling of why her mother is who she is, with the aid of a handy Bryan Adams lyric. Maternal ambivalence is a two-way street, and Adderson’s is a gut-wrenching depiction of its flip side. And then in the next chapter, “Mother-eye—the curse cast on every birthing woman, the hex of self-sacrificing empathy. I will see your pain, but you will never see mine.”
It’s at the end of this chapter when Ellen is diagnosed with breast cancer, and I’m going to tell you this, tell you this straight: Ellen dies.
I am telling you this because it’s revealed anyway in a tiny sentence on the back of the book (“…we watch Ellen negotiate the last year of her tumultuous life as the pieces of who she is finally come together.”), and in the epigraph as well, and I am telling you this because if you aren’t prepared, it might just be too terrible to take. When was the last time an author dared to kill off the central character in her novel and not even at the end of her novel…
…and of course, Virginia Woolf did, in To the Lighthouse, which I read last month, and which I see as having all kinds of parallels with Adderson’s book, although the two vary greatly in style (and Adderson’s prose is devourable, while Woolf’s must be savoured in measured portions). The notion of “time passes” and that we see a character through the eyes of those around her, the mixture of love and dislike and what lies between which makes up most relationships, and she isn’t even knowable to herself, because who has ever been so pinned down? That she a person whom people assemble around, in all her flaws and fallibility. If she is a solar system, here is the sun, and what happens after the light goes out?
The death scene is sublime, written from the perspective of Ellen’s young grandson, who has his own problems, and when I came to the paragraph break, I put down the book and sobbed and sobbed, and had to go find someone to comfort me—it’s rare that text on a page is ever this affecting. I was devastated, but also amazed at the beauty of the scene, of Adderson’s writing—it was perfect. Masterful.
In the final stories of the book, Ellen’s friends and family gather around her, offering richer perspectives on the scenes we’ve already read. I was especially besotted with “The Something Amendment,” from the perspective of Georgia, who is the third in Ellen’s friendship with Celine. We’ve previously known Georgia through her telephone conversations with Ellen, her jolly husband Gary chiming in from the background. As ever, however, the reality of life is more complicated than can be discerned from down a telephone wire, and Georgia’s own relationship with Ellen is different from even what Ellen suspects, and one of the great achievements of Adderson’s book, I think, is her rich portrayal of decades-long female friendships, the betrayals and compromises that are implicit in such relationships.
If I have to go out of my way to find a criticism of the book, it would be that the Ellen herself is so compelling that the chapters in which she’s at a distance are not as much—the half-grownness of Ellen’s lover is so bland compared to the presence of Ellen in her prime, although the characterization of him at home with his family is vivid, rich and surprising. Or maybe it’s just that I think that Ellen could have done better?
I don’t hate that she died. I wish she hadn’t, but I also didn’t feel like Adderson was using cancer or death as a plot device, to manipulate her characters or (worse!) to manipulate her reader. If its confrontation with cancer and mortality, Ellen in Pieces is a companion to Oh, My Darling by Shaena Lambert, which I read last year (and Lambert is thanked in Adderson’s acknowledgements; they share a publisher). It’s a brave take on things, really, but typical, because the exquisite nature of the entire book comes from Adderson defying her readers’ expectations, surprising you with every line, with every turn of the page.
It’s a novel in stories, or a collection of linked stories, or maybe a novel comprised of fragments, which is more like a life is than most novels I’ve ever read. The first three “chapters,” I’d read previously, and through which I’d become entranced with Adderson’s character, Ellen McGinty, divorced, determined, blundering, flawed, impulsive, hated, and loved. Because it’s rare to encounter such a character in fiction, a woman in the middle years of her life, a woman who is not a type, who has history, is unsure of what to do with her present, who has a body, experiences lust, gets tired, loves her children, cannot stand her children, has friends, fights with her friends, who is herself with such remarkable specificity—”Ellenish” is a term applied at one point in the book, and I knew exactly what they meant. It is rare that a character is so vividly realized—so familiar and yet utterly original at once.
Caroline Adderson pays attention to words, which are as specific as her characters. No one else would write a sentence like, “A melting weakness overtook her and she remembered all those years ago, not here but in Ellen’s North Vancouver kitchen, how he glissaded out of the way so Georgia could set down her platter of blintzes.” A platter of blintzes—has there ever been such a thing? The world reinvented through Adderson’s extraordinary, euphonic vocabulary.
In the first chapter, “I Feel Lousy”, Ellen discover that her younger daughter, not even the disappointing one, is pregnant, which evokes memories of her own troubled past, an accidental pregnancy with her ex-husband, the terrible, awful burden of motherhood, single motherhood in particular, and the lengths that a mother will go to—this mother in particular—for her daughter’s sake. “Poppycock” finds us a few years into the future, Ellen’s estranged father on her doorstep, obviously suffering from some kind of malady and she’s horrified to find him but also bowled over because he wants her, he needs her. She’d assumed her family had written her off altogether since she’d tried to sleep with her brother-in-law at her father’s 50th birthday years before. But the past, just like the present, turns out to be more complicated than that, and the reappearance of her father is a gift that comes with a shadow, a particularly long one.
And if you think that ending is devastating, read “Ellen-Celine, Celine-Ellen” next, about Ellen and her two friends whose relationship was forged at pre-natal class years ago, Ellen all alone because her asshole husband Larry had just abandoned her (the first time). The three stay close in the decades to follow, Ellen and Celine taking a trip to Europe together, which is ill-advised, so say their other friend, Georgia, and also Ellen’s hairdresser, Tony, because Ellen and Celine spend much of their friendship not being able to stand each other, a situated not mitigated by their strong personalities, and also that of the three friends who’d met in pre-natal class, it had been Celine’s baby that died.
Have I conveyed that these stories of death and crisis, all the drama of a life, are also funny? Adderson portrays human behaviour at the intersection of heroism and buffoonery, or else just irritability, to much effect. There’s a subtlety at work here. There are lines that are going to come along and break your heart.
The next few stories are more concerned with the present, pieces fitting more closely together. Ellen begins to find herself—her daughters are settling down, or else calming down; she sells her house; she takes up pottery again; after years of searching, she is learning to be present. She also starts sleeping with a young man who is her daughters’ age, which doesn’t hurt. She thinks she’s beginning to get over her ex-husband, Larry, whose desertion has wrung her heart for years and years.
One chapter is from the point of view of Matt, Ellen’s young lover, who is using Ellen to escape from his own troubled domestic situation. Another by Ellen’s older daughter, Mimi, who has overcome her problems with addiction but is still searching for something to hold onto, and still running from her mother too, whose presence is still vividly felt even from halfway across the country in Toronto, currently in the midst of a garbage strike. (Mimi traces back most of her problems to having once discovered her mother in bed with her grade-five teacher, whom she’d been in love with. Until that point.) Another word in this chapter, “orrery”, which recurs at the end of the story as Mimi rolls down a car window using a similar device. “She saw the moon, the faint stars vying for attention against the glare of human habitation. Pluto was up there somewhere, that small cold outcast planet far away. But there were people who still believed in it, people who wished it well.”
If the story doesn’t devastate you, I promise that the prose will.
At the end of this chapter, Mimi finally gets an inkling of why her mother is who she is, with the aid of a handy Bryan Adams lyric. Maternal ambivalence is a two-way street, and Adderson’s is a gut-wrenching depiction of its flip side. And then in the next chapter, “Mother-eye—the curse cast on every birthing woman, the hex of self-sacrificing empathy. I will see your pain, but you will never see mine.”
It’s at the end of this chapter when Ellen is diagnosed with breast cancer, and I’m going to tell you this, tell you this straight: Ellen dies.
I am telling you this because it’s revealed anyway in a tiny sentence on the back of the book (“…we watch Ellen negotiate the last year of her tumultuous life as the pieces of who she is finally come together.”), and in the epigraph as well, and I am telling you this because if you aren’t prepared, it might just be too terrible to take. When was the last time an author dared to kill off the central character in her novel and not even at the end of her novel…
…and of course, Virginia Woolf did, in To the Lighthouse, which I read last month, and which I see as having all kinds of parallels with Adderson’s book, although the two vary greatly in style (and Adderson’s prose is devourable, while Woolf’s must be savoured in measured portions). The notion of “time passes” and that we see a character through the eyes of those around her, the mixture of love and dislike and what lies between which makes up most relationships, and she isn’t even knowable to herself, because who has ever been so pinned down? That she a person whom people assemble around, in all her flaws and fallibility. If she is a solar system, here is the sun, and what happens after the light goes out?
The death scene is sublime, written from the perspective of Ellen’s young grandson, who has his own problems, and when I came to the paragraph break, I put down the book and sobbed and sobbed, and had to go find someone to comfort me—it’s rare that text on a page is ever this affecting. I was devastated, but also amazed at the beauty of the scene, of Adderson’s writing—it was perfect. Masterful.
In the final stories of the book, Ellen’s friends and family gather around her, offering richer perspectives on the scenes we’ve already read. I was especially besotted with “The Something Amendment,” from the perspective of Georgia, who is the third in Ellen’s friendship with Celine. We’ve previously known Georgia through her telephone conversations with Ellen, her jolly husband Gary chiming in from the background. As ever, however, the reality of life is more complicated than can be discerned from down a telephone wire, and Georgia’s own relationship with Ellen is different from even what Ellen suspects, and one of the great achievements of Adderson’s book, I think, is her rich portrayal of decades-long female friendships, the betrayals and compromises that are implicit in such relationships.
If I have to go out of my way to find a criticism of the book, it would be that the Ellen herself is so compelling that the chapters in which she’s at a distance are not as much—the half-grownness of Ellen’s lover is so bland compared to the presence of Ellen in her prime, although the characterization of him at home with his family is vivid, rich and surprising. Or maybe it’s just that I think that Ellen could have done better?
I don’t hate that she died. I wish she hadn’t, but I also didn’t feel like Adderson was using cancer or death as a plot device, to manipulate her characters or (worse!) to manipulate her reader. If its confrontation with cancer and mortality, Ellen in Pieces is a companion to Oh, My Darling by Shaena Lambert, which I read last year (and Lambert is thanked in Adderson’s acknowledgements; they share a publisher). It’s a brave take on things, really, but typical, because the exquisite nature of the entire book comes from Adderson defying her readers’ expectations, surprising you with every line, with every turn of the page.
February 26, 2018
Caroline Adderson's Ellen is a marvellous character who deals with the turmoils and regrets of middle-age with an exuberant determination to seize life and guzzle. For the most part, the narrative structure--a series of short stories told from different points of view--worked well for me, but I found the structure less successful toward the end of the novel when I would have appreciated more time inside Ellen's head. Then, the structure became distancing for me. But Adderson is a marvellous writer--glorious imagery, wit and astute observations mean there is plenty to enjoy.
March 26, 2017
I devoured this book. The tone was perfect, the voice of Ellen (reviewed to be an 'unlikeable' character, but I loved her) fresh and impossibly engaging.
The novel is told in vignettes, chapters exploring different moments in Ellen's life. Some are from Ellen's point-of-view, others from her daughters', her ex-husband, her lover. Adderson captures these moments--sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, always authentic--in pitch-perfect prose.
My only (small) quibble is that Ellen's voice got lost in Part Two, and I missed her. But not enough to love this novel any less.
The novel is told in vignettes, chapters exploring different moments in Ellen's life. Some are from Ellen's point-of-view, others from her daughters', her ex-husband, her lover. Adderson captures these moments--sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, always authentic--in pitch-perfect prose.
My only (small) quibble is that Ellen's voice got lost in Part Two, and I missed her. But not enough to love this novel any less.
November 23, 2014
I wanted to love this book but it was a bit of a frustrating read for me. The alternating points of view weren't always seamless for me, leaving me confused as to what was going on and what point in time we were. But, it's definitely an emotional read. I experienced the full range of emotions reading this story and I was rooting for Ellen all the way through.
December 8, 2014
In pieces all right. Ugh - what a disjointed novel. Many different time periods with different peoples viewpoints and no cohesion. I should have stopped reading as soon as I saw it was all over the place.. but lesson learned. It didn't get any better.
October 11, 2015
This novel is one to think about. Excellent writing and a story that draws you into Ellen's world. The only downside for me was the ending which I won't reveal. I was hoping.....
November 4, 2019
Only made it halfway, that's more than enough
May 21, 2021
2.5*
I wasn’t middle aged enough for this
I wasn’t middle aged enough for this
May 30, 2016
Ellen in Pieces is a perfect mess: a sprawling giant of a book that drags the reader through an astounding range of emotional territory and tones.
The title is a play on words. In the first sense, it’s about the format: Ellen in Pieces is delivered through a series of linked stories that touch down on various periods in protagonist Ellen McGuinty’s unruly life. In the second, Ellen is often figuratively in pieces, compromised by her huge appetites, occasional self-pity, a certain prickliness, and impulsiveness. She can be hard to take, but Adderson balances her all-too-human weaknesses with irresistible traits: Ellen goes after what she wants, and every time she stumbles she gets up again, tries again, and becomes new again. Also: she's exuberantly sexual and makes no apologies for this part of her energy.
Ellen is one of the most finely drawn characters I can remember reading, and her ex-husband, Larry—himself a major piece of work—is also one I’ve kept thinking about long after finishing the book.
Back to the messiness of the book, and what I mean by it. The relatively loose, gamboling structure Adderson employs and the different Ellens we encounter along the way are perfectly suited for the portrayal of a middle-aged woman grappling with her loves, her failings, who she is and was, and everything life throws at her. Our lives aren’t tidy, and this book does a masterful job of illuminating this, often with razor-sharp humour, sometimes with tear-your-heart-out pathos.
I can’t stop thinking about this book.
The title is a play on words. In the first sense, it’s about the format: Ellen in Pieces is delivered through a series of linked stories that touch down on various periods in protagonist Ellen McGuinty’s unruly life. In the second, Ellen is often figuratively in pieces, compromised by her huge appetites, occasional self-pity, a certain prickliness, and impulsiveness. She can be hard to take, but Adderson balances her all-too-human weaknesses with irresistible traits: Ellen goes after what she wants, and every time she stumbles she gets up again, tries again, and becomes new again. Also: she's exuberantly sexual and makes no apologies for this part of her energy.
Ellen is one of the most finely drawn characters I can remember reading, and her ex-husband, Larry—himself a major piece of work—is also one I’ve kept thinking about long after finishing the book.
Back to the messiness of the book, and what I mean by it. The relatively loose, gamboling structure Adderson employs and the different Ellens we encounter along the way are perfectly suited for the portrayal of a middle-aged woman grappling with her loves, her failings, who she is and was, and everything life throws at her. Our lives aren’t tidy, and this book does a masterful job of illuminating this, often with razor-sharp humour, sometimes with tear-your-heart-out pathos.
I can’t stop thinking about this book.
September 15, 2014
I know Caroline more through her children's books. So I knew she was smart-funny. But I didn’t, until this week, know that she was sharp-funny, wicked-funny, or raunchy-funny. And it turns out she is. Also, capable of writing scenes of chest-crushing sorrow.
I’m going to look at her in a whole different way now. And I’m also going to look up her backlist…
I’m going to look at her in a whole different way now. And I’m also going to look up her backlist…
February 6, 2017
Your future isn't written on the palm of your hand. It comes at you
in crots and snippets, in words printed on signs. You have to be ready for it. p185
But we are never ready for it, and the strangeness of lifes twisting loyalties is what gives our lives their particular stamp. If its true, as this book asserts, that we all exchange pieces of ourselves with every one we encounter, than the more we engage with life, the richer we will be.
I quite liked this book, and give it 3.5 in the gr system. 4/7 in mine.
I objected to losing Ellens POV through the last part.
I do love CA's style and plan to read it all as she evolves
in crots and snippets, in words printed on signs. You have to be ready for it. p185
But we are never ready for it, and the strangeness of lifes twisting loyalties is what gives our lives their particular stamp. If its true, as this book asserts, that we all exchange pieces of ourselves with every one we encounter, than the more we engage with life, the richer we will be.
I quite liked this book, and give it 3.5 in the gr system. 4/7 in mine.
I objected to losing Ellens POV through the last part.
I do love CA's style and plan to read it all as she evolves
December 30, 2018
This book wasn't good, it flipped between different points in time and told by many points of view. The characters were so dysfunctional and just not likeable. It was truly "in pieces" and was really disjointed. I found myself skimming this book near the end.
July 13, 2017
I've low-starred this book because it just didn't hold my attention well and felt scattered and random. I found the beginning hard to follow and even by the end, still didn't understand the hashed out family relationship in relation to the dad dying or even the point in including that part.
In fairness, although I stand behind my rating/review, I also read this book during an enormously personally stressful time and the "random" parts might just be me having glossed. That said, you don't generally "gloss" a captivating and engaging book. I would have wished to pick something else to read that distracted and entertained me when I needed it. This was not that.
In fairness, although I stand behind my rating/review, I also read this book during an enormously personally stressful time and the "random" parts might just be me having glossed. That said, you don't generally "gloss" a captivating and engaging book. I would have wished to pick something else to read that distracted and entertained me when I needed it. This was not that.
April 13, 2024
I read this book because my name was in the title. But it turned out to be a good book by a Canadian author set in Canada!
August 26, 2014
Ellen in Pieces by Caroline Adderson explores, through many different perspectives, the plight of a single mother once her girls are grown and she realizes that she is chock-full of regrets. Ellen McGinty, a loud-mouthed and occasionally vulgar Publicist, in an effort to reclaim a semblance of contentment, impulsively leaves her job, sells the house she raised her children in and begins to rebuild a sexy, happy new life.
Continue reading Arianna's review of Ellen in Pieces on The Savvy Reader!
When reading the synopsis of Ellen in Pieces by Caroline Adderson, I must say, I was expecting a relatively generic story of woman’s quest to self-realization; however, I was pleasantly surprised when Adderson depicted vivid, complex characters in a funny and emotionally powerful way.
Continue reading Arianna's review of Ellen in Pieces on The Savvy Reader!
July 23, 2016
This book, representing pieces of a woman´s life, is so well scripted it feels she is part of the reader's life. The author has skillfully created in Ellen, a main character so ordinary she is exceptional, and so west coast. The underlying theme of relationships with family, friends, and lovers, blends in well with Ellen´s surroundings. The minor characters are endearing: a philandering ex-husband, daughters with issues, a confused father, a loyal dog, an estranged sister, needy friends and a young lover. They all make up the pieces of Ellen´s life, as they do for many of us. As one character remarks, "Still, every person who comes into your life gives you a piece of themselves. And vice versa." Many times I felt I was reading pieces of my own life, as I am sure many readers will experience. You will laugh and you will cry as you read Ellen in Pieces. When I closed the book at the end, I wanted to read it again. That doesn´t happen often.
June 14, 2016
Ellen waited all her life for her first husband Larry to love her properly. He didn't deserve her love and devotion. She lapped up scraps of his attention through the years like a starving animal.
Matt was to young to stay in Ellen's Life but he made her life at that time a happier one
Her best friend was not a best friend af all and I wanted to punch her in the face when I read how she deceived Ellen.
But Tony well Tony was the one for Ellen all along. So handsome, smart, debonair, loyal. Tony gave the love and devotion to Ellen she deserved all along. So why was Tony was pushed out of Ellen's life at a time when they needed each other most? For me it was Team Tony and they should have been together in the end. Him by her side.
Matt was to young to stay in Ellen's Life but he made her life at that time a happier one
Her best friend was not a best friend af all and I wanted to punch her in the face when I read how she deceived Ellen.
But Tony well Tony was the one for Ellen all along. So handsome, smart, debonair, loyal. Tony gave the love and devotion to Ellen she deserved all along. So why was Tony was pushed out of Ellen's life at a time when they needed each other most? For me it was Team Tony and they should have been together in the end. Him by her side.
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November 5, 2014A warm, wonderful book - really linked short stories, seamlessly blended. Basically, the novel is about the ripple effect one person can have on everyone in her life. The centerpiece is Ellen, a fiftyish woman who married young, divorced young, had two daughters, and is now a potter in Kitsilano. Revolving around her are her skittish ex, Larry, who like the proverbial cat keeps coming back, two daughters with their own problems, a young lover, and a delightful dog called Tony (after Ellen's hairdresser).
That's all I'll say. You must read this book.
That's all I'll say. You must read this book.
September 28, 2014
I really loved this book. Ellen is a force to be reckoned with and I enjoyed every minute I got to spend with her. I lost some interest in the story in the middle of the novel and at times the multiple viewpoints were a bit to much (I kept wanting Ellen's voice back) but by the time I flipped the very last page I was smitten. It was funny, heartbreaking, and relatable. Being from Vancouver myself I also really appreciated the strong sense of place.
December 18, 2014
4.5 stars. This is an exceptionally brilliant and beautiful novel that reminded me of Carol Shields. It's about a character who is like a real-life person. Ellen, the titular character, is imperfect and brash, and the reader gets to experience her life through a series of short stories that all link together. This is an incredible, sad and funny book.
Off to write a column about it now.
Off to write a column about it now.
September 14, 2014
My ONLY complaint about this book is that it wasn't longer. I wanted more. I finished last night and immediately began to miss Ellen. The writing is pitch perfect: funny, intuitive, heart-breakingly honest. This one is definitely going on my 'to be re-read' shelf.
September 18, 2014
This is one of those books that will not let you put it down. I miss the world of Ellen and her family already, and I feel like I know these characters deeply. A beautiful, sad, funny and sexy book. How did Caroline get all that into one novel??
May 18, 2015
Loved this book, bought in Whistler on Saturday and finished it last night. She's a Vancouver writer who has written a beautiful story that completed captured my imagination and gave me the break that I needed!
April 24, 2016
Most of this book is an amusing witty novel about middle-aged life, but suddenly in the last 100 pages, it becomes something else entirely -- reminds me of Carol Shields in the way she slides from the comedy of manners to the elemental without missing a beat.
November 28, 2014
It was okay but I wouldn't recommend it.
December 31, 2014
So so.
January 10, 2018
I’m becoming so much better at abandoning a book that just doesn’t interest me. I gave it good try.....half way through I started skimming, then gave in to my new philosophy (life’s too short).
July 12, 2015
I loved the book. Funny, insightful and just hard to put down. I miss Ellen!
March 11, 2024
"He blushed, and it struck Ellen again how simple the world is for people under thirty, for whom love has barely been compromised by life. Love, unopened, still in its shiny package."
I put a marker in the page that contained the above. What a wonderful bit of writing! There are surely other bits almost as good, throughout "Ellen In Pieces."
And yet, this seemed like a rather long novel, although just over 300 pages, it's fairly standard in length. As a (sad to admit it) middle aged woman who lives in the Vancouver area I could certainly find things to identify with, although Ellen has surely had a more wild and artsy life, living for years on Cordova Island (couldn't find it on a map: perhaps it's a stand-in for Cortez Island? If so, why the stand-in when other places in the novel are actual ones?)
Caroline Adderson has a tendency to do "dangle writing" where she dangles a scenario before you and you're wondering what the heck she's talking about, so you keep reading, confused and a bit irritated, till the "ah-ha" kicks in and you find out what a scene is about, or who it's about or where it is set. This happened so many times throughout "Ellen In Pieces" and it slows down the flow of things. For example:
"The yawning beigeness of the room. Beige walls, beige booths, beige floors. Matt is so head-bobbingly tired his chin keeps sinking to his chest. Every time, her remembers more."
Then, a bit later:
"Every time the number on the pixel board changes---Beep!---it startles Matt, who jerks uprght in his chair. The same coarse beep as in that Operation game he played as a kid, trying to to tweeze out the dude's broken heart and accidentally touching the metal rim. He looks blearily around the room, wishing stupidly for a certain, familiar face."
And on, and on it goes, for pages, until we finally find out that this is a passport office. I don't get the charm in not telling readers what is going on right away. Couldn't Addison have written, "The yawning beigeness of the passport office. Beige walls, beige booths, beige floors..." Why make us wait to find out where the heck Matt is sitting?
Also, I could have done without the extensive chapters on secondary characters such as Mimi, and Matt, away in different cities.
And what's with all the steak that Ellen and on-again, off-again ex husband Larry eat?
Still, an impressive book, that shows that Caroline Addison is a pretty good writer.
I put a marker in the page that contained the above. What a wonderful bit of writing! There are surely other bits almost as good, throughout "Ellen In Pieces."
And yet, this seemed like a rather long novel, although just over 300 pages, it's fairly standard in length. As a (sad to admit it) middle aged woman who lives in the Vancouver area I could certainly find things to identify with, although Ellen has surely had a more wild and artsy life, living for years on Cordova Island (couldn't find it on a map: perhaps it's a stand-in for Cortez Island? If so, why the stand-in when other places in the novel are actual ones?)
Caroline Adderson has a tendency to do "dangle writing" where she dangles a scenario before you and you're wondering what the heck she's talking about, so you keep reading, confused and a bit irritated, till the "ah-ha" kicks in and you find out what a scene is about, or who it's about or where it is set. This happened so many times throughout "Ellen In Pieces" and it slows down the flow of things. For example:
"The yawning beigeness of the room. Beige walls, beige booths, beige floors. Matt is so head-bobbingly tired his chin keeps sinking to his chest. Every time, her remembers more."
Then, a bit later:
"Every time the number on the pixel board changes---Beep!---it startles Matt, who jerks uprght in his chair. The same coarse beep as in that Operation game he played as a kid, trying to to tweeze out the dude's broken heart and accidentally touching the metal rim. He looks blearily around the room, wishing stupidly for a certain, familiar face."
And on, and on it goes, for pages, until we finally find out that this is a passport office. I don't get the charm in not telling readers what is going on right away. Couldn't Addison have written, "The yawning beigeness of the passport office. Beige walls, beige booths, beige floors..." Why make us wait to find out where the heck Matt is sitting?
Also, I could have done without the extensive chapters on secondary characters such as Mimi, and Matt, away in different cities.
And what's with all the steak that Ellen and on-again, off-again ex husband Larry eat?
Still, an impressive book, that shows that Caroline Addison is a pretty good writer.
September 20, 2016
I felt this too when I found out about Joanne--ripped off from my perspective, angry and shocked. But, I thought of her for a long time without knowing she was gone, and so she continued to be alive for me. It made finding out so painful, but I was saved from it for awhile too.
"When Mimi finishes her tea, she'll get on the SeaBus and go home. Get ready for tonight. Except she's rattled by what just happened and, now, jealous too. All this time Ellen was alive for Matt. She only just died. For two years Mimi's been staunching her severed umbilical cord. But see how she broke the news? How she said, 'She died' for the first time without tearing up?"
Again, great description, great showing, not telling a little bit about who Mimi is as a person.
"Her fingers discover that the fastener on her chain has migrated around to meet the cross. She makes two sharp, throat-slashing movements to send it back."
Mimi speaks to Matt about her feelings (not knowing how he is to her mother) and this is a poignant reminder. How do we get remembered if we do not have children, have people's lives carry on? Is memory the only thing we need to leave? Does it all really matter?
"'He says it's not just about Ellen. It's about how every person who comes into your life gives you a piece of themselves. And vice versa. I still forget she's dead. But soon I won't. Then how will I keep her in my life?'"
This is the truth (except the peanut butter maybe).
"...And this was the secret to a long and happy life--to be interested. And to eat peanut butter."
Good description, showing not telling Mimi's feelings.
"...Mimi made teeny-mouth as she dropped in the fare."
Ellen found true love, at last.
"She came to her decision then. She would forget Matt. Forget Larry. What had they, or any man, ever done for her? She was always giving, giving herself away. No more, she decided. No more. She would get Tony neutered and live with him instead. Long slow walks in the morning, reading together every night. In between, a little bit of squeaky banana and some fetch. The second half of her life unspooled before her like a newsreel, its headline blazing: CONTENTMENT! CONTENTMENT!"
The dog, Matt, Ellen, all come together, is coming together, is developing.
"She pressed the phone against her ribs, pressed it hard, but it wasn't any use. It had been building all this time. And out it came. Out and out and out.
Tony laid back his ears and cocked his head to one side, but both of them knew because both of them had read the story. The end was still a long, long way away and the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning."
Ellen's pottery reveals itself.
"Lately, though, she just lets the pattern flow out the end of her tool, following it, instead of leading. So far she's been pleased. She works her way around the pot, liberating its negative space, creating the pattern that she somehow senses was always there in the clay, waiting for her. Sometimes it meets up perfectly where she started.
Sometimes it doesn't."
Nice image of the butterflies.
"A fluttering started inside Ellen that was very pleasant in itself, like a cloud of butterflies inhaled. ..."
When people don't want to be a bother, they are bothers. Again, am I? Would I be?
"...'What do you want for breakfast? Cereal, toast, eggs?'
'Don't go to any trouble.'
'I won't. Just tell me what you want.'
'Cereal's fine.'
'It's fine or it's what you want.'"
Am I a wee bit like this? Are lots of people?
"Four hours after that, Ellen drove the car into the garage at home and parked. Jaw clenched, she helped her father out. Anger, her default emotion, not always appropriately. For example, when her mother died. Later she'd felt all kinds of things, but right off the top of any given situation, she was usually blistering."
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