Rating: 4.5* of five

 

My essay on the publishing house Outpost19 and Margaret Overton's deeply moving and supremely timely memoir is live at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud: My Reading Life.

 

This slim book should, in a properly ordered world, ignite a nation-wide conversation about the events at the end of our lives. It is a wonderful book. 

I jumped at the chance to obtain an advance reader copy of Margaret Overton's Good in a Crisis: A Memoir via NetGalley; as a divorce survivor myself, the opportunity to read someone else's version of how it goes, especially when the book is being compared to Nora Ephron's Heartburn, was a must-read.Good in a Crisis: A Memoir starts out as a compelling read; Overton has a witty voice that's easy to read, and her ability to laugh in the face of just about any embarrassing event, including the discovery of the aneurysm that followed her separation from her husband, is to be envied. Overton is blunt and succinct, and usually able to sum up in one sentence what many of us discover during a divorce: There are no winners, only bigger jerks. Her tales of online dating and friend fix-ups had me near tears from laughing so hard, because they were so familiar an experience to those friends have gone through.About halfway through, however, Good in a Crisis: A Memoir suddenly becomes an entirely different book. Where it began as what felt like witty banter among friends, it becomes, for the second half, a far more serious and reflective book, focusing on death and sorrow and depression. The second half was much harder to read, possibly because it felt like a completely different book than the one I'd thought I was reading. It was still good, and still had much to say about life and loss, and rated separately, I'd probably have given it a four-star rating, but the jarring transition from the first half to the second was a difficult one to make. It may have been a different read for me had I known what to expect going in, but as it was, I was somewhat disappointed in the second half, which seemed to drag.Overall, it was still a very worthwhile read, but at this point in my life, I'd have preferred to read more of the first half and less of the second.This review originally published at Epinions: http://www.epinions.com/review/Margaret_Overton_Good_in_a_Crisis_A_Memoir_epi/content_579204189828