All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy: A Memoir

Joyce Maynard writes, "As for me, I've chosen to follow a simple course: Come clean. And wherever possible, live your life in a way that won't leave you tempted to lie. Failing that, I'd rather be disliked for who I truly am than loved for who I'm not. So I tell my story. I write it down. I even publish it. Sometimes this is a humbling experience. Sometimes it's embarrassing. But I haul around no terrible secrets." Spike Gillespie hauls around no terrible secrets. Had she been secretive, there would be few reactions to her book. She doesn't wear heavy makeup or a phony disguise. This is her version of the truth. If there was one absolute truth, we wouldn't need memoirists.I'm really glad she wrote this book. Women have always been punished for admitting they are sexual beings or that they want it all--a relationship, a family, a career, a sex life. Women are supposed to make polite tidy choices. Women are not supposed to be adventurers. I'm glad Spike didn't do what she was supposed to do. I'm glad Spike has the courage to tell her story--and to tell it in an engaging graphic fast-paced way.

This is a beautifully told story of how a strictly controlled exuberant & gifted character can resemble an over-pruned tree ~ it loses it's shape & grows every which-way ~ but grows a strong deep tap-root to compensate.Spike Gillespie has a lovely talent to hook the reader at once ~ like the Ancient Mariner ~ there was no way I could stop listening until she had finished her tale; I read it at a sitting. It documents the growth of a huge personality, blind to the powers she had & that everybody else recognises. Everybody assumed she knew how strong she was & probably feared her strength, wanted control over it or hoped they could lean on her. The book is also a testimony to the friends who supported her trying to cope with her amazing talent to communicate. Fate kindly sent her a sweet son in compensation. Fate also simultaneously dropped on her the worst of modern calamities ~ divorce, house-moving, major surgery & a persistent stalker, but like a Phoenix she has risen to soar over it all to record it all in this brilliant ( & beautifully produced) book. Her column is a joy ~ long may she soar over us.

This writer has another book in her ten to fifteen years down the line, reworking some of this same material, and I want to read that one too. For now, though, this one will more than do.This is a crime scene report of a book, a bomb damage assessment report, but you don't need to have witnessed the crime or experienced the explosion to be fascinated by a protagonist who survives (it seems) on sheer guts and spirit alone. She is self-absorbed, yes, her nerve fails her countless times. She makes the same mistakes over and over, and I found that painful. But I understood somehow that this was a woman in the midst of stanching the flow from a potentially fatal wound -- who wouldn't be self-absorbed at such a time?More telling to me than her repeated mistakes with men was her obvious capacity for friendship. For all her moving about and continual leaving of people and places behind, this woman makes friends for life. She sticks by them, and they stick by her. She betrays them on occasion and is betrayed by them, but the friendships survive. It's not entirely clear why this is so, in the often-frantic spun-out storyline, but the reader comes to count on it.(The writing is excellent, by the way, deceptively effortless, unselfconscious. The pace and pitch are dead-on. Ms. Gillespie is clearly a born storyteller, a gifted spinner of narrative yarns.) But back to the story. The key to the protagonist's survival -- or the second key -- comes into focus at the very end. The first key, of course, is her stubbornness. Her spirit. That's clear throughout. But the reader wants more -- not simply to know that somehow, against all odds, this woman will get to her feet again. The reader wants reason to hope for her. And this is where the second key comes in. We see it in her relationship with her son, of course, but not simply because this woman is finally loved unconditionally. Rather, we see the enormous generosity this woman is capable of when that bleeding she's worked her whole life to slow is finally stopped.Writing to her son, remembering for him a memory of a restaurant they'd visited together when he was a toddler, she wonders what memories he'll have as he grows older, and what stories he'll tell. "I can't wait to sit and listen," she says.And this, I think, will be what saves her. What makes her story more than simply one of survival. She has repaired herself -- or been repaired -- enough to slow down, to pause, to take in those around her who love her and whom she loves back completely, even while granting them the autonomy to have their own memories, and tell their own stories.

I have followed spike gillespie's on line column for three years, so the fact that her first book is heart-felt, sweetly fun, inquisitive, reflective, and startlingly personal is something that her readers have almost come to expect, but most, I imagine, like myself, are refreshed and delighted to delve deeper into this world (her world? our world?) for a more epic length, almost as one might be delighted if a best friend chose to spend the summer with you rather than a weekend. what makes ms. gillepsie's work so special is what lies at the heart of all the best literature: by entering into her pages and chronicles, we are in relation to someone who is as real as though they were in the room, and someone who will "enter our room" every time we open the book. yet spike, her family, and her friends, are only part of what we are offered: we also are privileged to see the commonality of human experience, and, from the distance of the book, the poetry of this experience, and by relation, our own: sometimes loving, sometimes barren, often tender and sad, always achingly beautiful. I read ms. gillespie's column for over a year before I discovered that it was intended primarily for women, and, even more specifically, single mothers. it is a testimony to the power of her work that, as a husband and father, the "target audience" never occured to me, for then, as now, it is clear that ms. gillespie speaks to, and for, everyone's heart. someday I hope we might be able to look at a collection of such books by spike gillespie that offer the same. until that day comes, I am happy to read her column on line, and feel as though, like so many readers, I am privileged to read a letter of wit, candor, joy and sorrow every single week from a best friend I have never met.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book; so much in fact that I purchased additional copies for my friends. It's an incredibly personal look at the life that is Spike. She unflinchingly describes her successes and failures in love and life - I don't know if Spike keeps a diary, but I suspect if she does, she wrote this book unedited straight from it. The title of the book may give the impression that it's about bashing men; if you're looking for a book that validates your belief that men are evil, then this isn't the book. If you're looking for a book that illustrates that it's the people in your life that are most important and that you should choose those people very carefully, then click on "Add to Shopping Cart". - Bil