How to Talk to a Widower is both funny and heartbreaking. Doug Parker is 29-years-0ld and has been widowed for about a year after his 40-year-old wife, Haley, died in a plane crash. Doug is stuck in a place where his grief is still fresh with each day yet the world is expecting him to move on and put his life back together.
Doug remains in their home in a neighborhood filled with mostly married couples. He has a teenage stepson, Russ, who is acting out as he handles his grief. Russ keeps coming back to Doug and his house rather than going to his birth father. Doug struggles to play an active “father” role rather than an older peer role, but throughout the book you can see the bond between Doug and Russ is strong. Doug writes a column about his experience as a young widower and it draws a lot of attention, with his agent even wanting to make a book out of it. Doug expresses how difficult it is to be seeing success with work when he could not care less about it.
Doug’s twin sister Claire, has some life problems of her own and temporarily moves in with Doug. She starts trying to set him up on dates to get him out in the world again. Most of the dating adventures don’t go very well. Doug ends up having an affair with a married neighbor woman, and having intimacy issues with a woman he is dating who he is actually interested in. Claire does somehow manage to pull Doug and Russ together into more of a family unit and helps motivate Doug to get out of the house a little more.
This is the second book that I have read by Jonathan Tropper and I enjoyed it just as much as the first. His characters are full of life and you end up really liking them…even when they are a little messed up. There are parts that are laugh out loud funny and parts that touch you as being hard and true. I thought it was a fast, enjoyable read.
09/08/2010 at 9:32 am Permalink
Looks like a fun yet sad story, no? I might be interested to pick this one up!
10/08/2010 at 5:23 pm Permalink
I read outloud to Josh the date where the woman never stopped talking. Funny. I’ve heard that this has been optioned for a movie and I think it could be done well. The two things I think he presented most that affected me were: 1. grief- how personal and yet universal it is and 2. how hard it is to accept good things that come as a result of bad things that you didn’t want to have happen.
Which Jonathan Tropper book are you onto next? I read Plan B already.