Since I've been writing more about the books I read, I have been keeping better track not only of what I read but also of who wrote it.

(Side note: Saw this on twitter today on the value of keeping a book journal. May have to start something similar. Anyone out there have a method that works they'd like to share??)

In any case, as I've mentioned before I'm a big fan of Stewart Onan, Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Weiner (did you catch her last night in the Bravo Clubhouse with Andy Cohen!?)


Add Elizabeth Flock to that list.

"But Inside I'm Screaming" marks the fourth of her novels I've gotten lost in, though it's the first one she published. ("Me & Emma" and "Sleepwalking in Daylight" "Everything Must Go" are the others.)

In Screaming, we meet driven TV journalist Isabel Murphy as she's freezing on national television during coverage of Princess Diana's accident. The fallout from her failing marriage and faltering career prove too much and she finds herself at Three Breezes, a psychiatric hospital.

Her struggle to regain her mental health balance is very relatable. Who has on occasion felt overwhelmed?
Who hasn't thought if I could just have the time to pull it together? What makes some of us able to continue to move forward? And how would I cope if suddenly it was all just too much?

As Isabel says to a therapist:

"You can imagine? What? You can imagine what it's like to go from having everything to having nothing? To be treated like an infant sometime and an inmate others? I can't even count how many times I've traveled, alone, mind you, to foreign countries to cover pretty dangerous stories - wars, even. And yet I can barely take two steps out of the unit without someone telling me to sign myself out."

Like her therapist I can't imagine. But after reading Flock's work I have a better idea.

Read an excerpt of "But Inside I'm Screaming" here. You won't want to stop.

See you in the stacks!

Tricia Ambrose

The Tremendous Power of Book Love IS a great blog title, Jason. Perhaps that could be the subtitle of my autobiography??

My quest to read all the works of Elizabeth Flock continued on my weekend car ride with "Everything Must Go."

It's the story of Henry Powell, a high school football hero whose promising future fizzles. He finds himself stuck as a clerk in a small-town departments store still dreaming of his future still crushed by guilt and family demands.

Flock's Henry is to be pitied.

Over and over as the novel leaps back and forth in time from his high school days to his middle age to his childhood and in between, he chooses to stay stuck.

Do we do the same?

Do we have internal conversations about what we are going to do and how we are going to change our lives, only to keep sabotaging those moves?

Do we get stuck in a time warp, not realizing how quickly life is passing us by?

Henry sure does.

After a failed relationship, he obsesses over what went wrong. After months he works up the nerve to call her, and she cuts it short. Then there's a chance meeting at the department store.

""You never called me back that time I called you. You said you were just going out for about an hour to run and do something and I waited and you never called me back."
Her mouth drops open.
...
"Oh, my God, Henry. That was almost six years ago, she says.
She pulls her purse in closer to her body. "Oh my God.""

Those six wasted years are par for the course in Henry's life.

As in her other works, Flock has created characters that are easy to connect with.

And I can't wait for more.

- Tricia Ambrose

Elizabeth Flock's "Me & Emma" is the kind of book that stays with you. It's the story of two sisters and the horrors of their childhood. It's the kind of novel that makes you want to go back and reread certain parts as soon as you finish it.

Tough to top, to say the least.

But, for me, Flock has done just that with "Sleepwalking in Daylight" (ISBN 978077832513)

In Sleepwalking we meet Samantha Friedman, a married mother who's questioning her marriage, her mothering skills, her very life, and her adopted daughter Cammy who's got her own struggles to handle and feels increasingly distanced from her mother.

Sam's dissatisfaction with her life leads her to honestly answer the stranger on a train who asks "Do you ever want to walk away from your life?"

Who hasn't asked themselves that question in a moment of stress? But for Sam it's much more than a moment.

As she says, "Cheating is a choice. ... Here is where I could turn things around and do the right thing. This is the moment I'll look back on as a defining one in my life. I should feel shaky or filled with fear and doubt and guilt. I should hesitate."

But, for Sam, her moment of clarity comes much later.

Flock has crafted a most believable cast of characters. Her dialogue reads like you're eavesdropping at a coffeehouse; it's that authentic.

If you're a fan of novels that provide a peek into the complicated world of mother-daughter and marital relationships, I highly recommend.

- Tricia Ambrose