How the Light Gets In

by Joyce Maynard

She knows now, as she did not once, what matters and what really doesn’t. At fifty-eight years old, Eleanor has reached a stage in her life when it no longer makes sense to revisit all the old grievances or to hold on to bitterness that hurt nobody as much as one’s self. She has forgiven Cam for all the ways he disappointed and hurt her. She has had to forgive herself, too, for her own vast catalog of shortcomings and failures, poor choices, damage incurred to those she loved and to herself. She knows now what she did not before, that every family’s history is made up of many stories—all probably possessing some element of truth, but none of them, individually, containing all of it.