curiouslykatt's Reviews (1.12k)

“Maybe your life is a well-orchestrated series of elegant vignettes, with perfect photo opportunities every ten minutes, but if you’re anything like the rest of us then you’re lurching from one near-disaster to the next, crossing your legs every time you cough so you don’t pee your pants after having had four children.”

This was a brutally blunt, laugh out loud riot of a read. This is by far one of the most relatable books I’ve read in a long time and I truly think every reader will say “oh, I’ve been there.” 

The story starts with Frances driving the neighbourhood kids to school in the daily carpool, and let me tell you Frances is someone I want to have a glass of wine with. Her inner thoughts are just absolute top tier, but she doesn’t let a lot of those thoughts out. She’s saint Frances. She’s that mom, the one who helps, the one who handles everything for everyone. After one of the neighbour kids forgets a bag for school, Frances being the do-it-all mom she is, returns to that home to get the bag. Enter Frances stumbling upon Anne, her neighbour, partaking in some early morning shenanigans with a man who is definitely not her husband. Things get very chaotic as the other neighbours get a whiff of the local scandal. 

What unfurls is an interconnect story of how one affair reverberates through all four families. As one marriage is imploding publicly, cracks begin to show in the other families and their own drama is bubbling to the surface. 

Waxman does a phenomenal job writing laugh-out-loud scenes while balancing some heavier topics that many parents and seemingly happily married people are forced to confront. 

At the end of the day, the grass is just as patchy next door as yours is, nobody uses a coaster, but if you’re the neighbour who would vacuum the lawn while drama is going down at the house across the way, I’ll bring the wine and we can be friends. 

An unconventional name for a deeply honest memoir. 

David could have been a horrible story teller and writer (re: Britney Spears memoir) and this would have still been an amazing read. Lucky for us readers, David in fact is an excellent writer, he is engaging, funny, sarcastic, blunt, messy, and willing to share his personal journey in reconciliation and understanding. 

David’s wife, Jaime, was badly injured in a 2002 terrorist bombing at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His wife was fortunate to survive, their friends were not so lucky. A surgeon gave David a piece of shrapnel that was removed from her body, a small broken nut. This small piece of metal changed his life and that of his wife’s forever. David being an academic by nature and a “forever student” had many unanswered questions after the bombing, mainly: Why? His goal now is to meet the man, and his family, who left the backpack with the bomb in the crowded cafeteria in July. Not out of revenge, but out of desperation to heal and understand. 

This memoir is told in a non-linear story telling at the beginning. We jump around between how David and Jamie met and decided to move to Israel which is broken up by the days leading up to the bombing as well as the initial days after the bombing. 

David will take some time to dive into the history of Israel and Palestine. There are chapters devoted to the political failings, broken promises for peace, unfair double standards, outright hostilities, among the plethora of issues which have caused and maintained the tension. 

We finish the memoir with David going to East Jerusalem and sitting down to talk to people who he is now bound to by violence. 

At the end of it you won’t have the answers to the questions you wanted but you’ll come out with hope and a new understanding.