Books |
Those We Love Most
Lee Woodruff
By
Published: Sep 09, 2012
Category:
Fiction
After Peter Jennings stepped down in 2005, Bob Woodruff became the co-anchor of ABC World News Tonight.
A month later, he went to Iraq to report on the positive news that the Bush Administration said the media was ignoring.
He was filmed eating ice cream in a Baghdad snack shop. He was filmed chatting with friendly Iraqis.
For two days, he covered what passed for good news in the hellhole that was Iraq in 2005.
On the third day, a roadside bomb nearly killed him.
Bob Woodruff was in a medically induced coma for 36 days.
I think it’s fair to say that his wife has deep knowledge of that cliché: Life can change in an instant.
Lee and Bob Woodruff married in 1988. They had a picture-perfect life: his move up the ranks at ABC, a true partnership of a marriage, four children, a house in Westchester and an upstate retreat.
Now they have a foundation that supports wounded war veterans, a book about Bob’s recovery that became a bestseller — and Lee Woodruff is a novelist.
I met Lee Woodruff after last year’s benefit evening in New York. She was beautiful, funny, irreverent — nobody’s idea of blonde arm candy. I got that she was an activist. A journalist. Proprietor of a web site. I didn’t see that she had the time or the temperament for the fiction trade.
But here is “Those We Love Most,” which not only works as a novel but as a morality play. Traditionalists will be delighted. Sophisticates will be challenged. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Consider the main character: Maura Corrigan. She’s married to her college sweetheart and is raising their three kids in a sleepy suburb of Chicago. Their dreams are ordinary, their failings predictable. And their thoughts… well, here’s Maura, talking about her marriage: “Sometimes we feel like two people connected by three kids.”
And then — you guessed it — their lives change in an instant.
Because — you guessed it — she’s reading a text message from a man who’s not her husband when her nine-year-old son is hit by a car. Four days later, he’s dead.
Does Maura feel guilty? Massively. And she’s not the only one. Her father has been having an affair with a woman in Florida; on business trips south, it’s almost as if they’re married. And then, because bad things happen when you’re doing something you shouldn’t, his life also changes in an instant. As does his marriage.
A wrathful God inhabits this universe.
My compassion usually stops a mile short of people who marry young and, despite a zillion reasons to scream or cheat or just leave, persevere. Lee Woodruff’s characters are even more exasperating for me. They have such little lives: no concerns larger than their families, boring jobs, thrills the size of a hole in one. And they’re moral, in the most frightened, limited way.
And yet…reading this novel, I missed my stop on the bus. Twice.
I took it to meetings so I could read on the way.
And when I compared the marital histories in this novel to the histories of the oh-so-smart, oh-so-clever people I know, I couldn’t really say my friends are smarter.
To my complete surprise and total consternation, I came to see it as Woodruff’s characters do. I cared for them. I wanted to tell them: Do this…don’t do that. That is, I forgot I was reading a book and reacted as if I knew these people.
Not a small achievement.
