Jamie Cat Callan, a great author and a super fun teacher, is introducing an author friend of hers this Tuesday for a signing at a local bookstore. Her friend, Teresa Link, wrote a book called “Denting the Bosch”. I liked the title so much I decided to read the book before going to the signing on Tuesday.
The book is about six couples in their fifties growing apart and reevaluating their marriages and their lives. I just got to the page where the title is mentioned and it certainly sets the symbolism for the plots in the book. I won’t comment further on it because I don’t want to ruin the effect for those who might want to read the book. The author’s style is easy to read, but yet her use of symbolism to describe the emotions of her characters quickly puts the reader right into their heads and made me, as a reader, “feel” right along with them. I’m still in the first 100 pages, but the story keeps me looking for more.
Yesterday my husband and I went to see Hope Springs. Yet another story about a couple in their fifties growing apart and reevaluating their marriage and their lives.
What both book and movie have in common is that in the troubled marriages, none involve “the other woman” as a major character. All the couples seem to be standing in a quiet place and feeling the lights of passion and love slowly dimming just between the two of them, without the outside influence of another person. How unique and how refreshing and….how very, very, real.
Most couples in my age group experience bumps in the road and periods of time where they’ve lost connection. Most couples recognize it like the characters in the movie, without another person being involved. Sometimes it leads to a parting of the ways, but most times this very intimate conflict is resolved by both people growing and changing, making it a positive growth phase for each person separately, as well as a couple.
But these stories don’t make news. (Not even in the local gossip circles.) These stories, without the third person, don’t make books or movies. Yet it is these stories that are close to home and touch the lives of many more people, than the ones that contain that third person as a significant player.
When the two people make it and end up with that smile that is on Arnold’s face at the end of the movie (I’m not giving it away – it was shown on Sunday Morning) hope really does spring from such a story that validates the vulnerability and humanness of living with someone for thirty years. With work and trust, two people standing in that quiet place where they realize something is wrong and needs their undivided attention, really can rekindle that with which they started with so many years ago. Unlike most break-up movies of today where the unhappy party runs to someone else and that private, intimate, quiet space that allows the two people to work it out between them, is lost, Hope Springs shows how it is for the rest of us. I could feel the energy in the audience as the movie connected with those who are there or those who have already gone thru it.
Read “Denting the Bosch” and see “Hope Springs”.
And so, as another day goes by, the twist in the stories might not be that exciting and as captivating as those that contain “the other woman or man”, but in a way they are much more real and close to home, and ….I have written.
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