Books:The Slippery Year
The slippery year witten by Melanie Gideon is to be published next week by Alfred A. Knopf.With self-effacing humor, Ms. Gideon chronicles the mundanity and small epiphanies of everyday life: taking a trip to Trader Joe’s on her 44th birthday, waiting in the car-pool line at her 9-year-old son’s school and spending thousands of dollars to buy a mattress that both she and her husband of nearly two decades can tolerate. “It’s really a book about nothing or everything. What I discovered is that writing about nothing, I was writing about everything.”said Gideon.
With a 25,000-copy first print run, Knopf’s ambitions are modest. Like every publisher wishing for a breakout, it is counting on word of mouth to propel the book. Some early readers have already had the impulse to share the memoir with friends and family. “I was reading pieces of that book out loud to my friends and husband because I was dying laughing,” said Karen West, a 43-year-old wife and mother who is director of events at Book Passage, an independent bookstore in Corte Madera, Calif., and San Francisco. Other readers have been turned of by Ms. Gideon’s breezy tone and what they see as self-indulgence. “Things are pretty tough right now,” said Ms. Jennings, founder and president of Rainy Day Books, an independent bookstore near Kansas City, Mo “I started thinking: ‘Really? Your husband is nice. Your son is great. Maybe you’re having a midlife crisis, but I’m not sure I’m really on the page with you.”
Although “The Slippery Year” contains large swaths of snappy dialogue, Ms. Gideon said she never took notes and didn’t rush home after incidents to record them. “The things that I remembered are just what I remembered also I do not want to write a memoir that revealed all her family’s warts,just some meoir,not all.”
