![]() The narrator does indeed refer to the characters as "the husband" and "the wife," no one is named in this memoir, and the third person narrative is only occasionally broken by a first person chapter. The beginning, at least, is clear: in the opening pages, the husband unexpectedly tells the wife "I'm not happy " the wife then proceeds to interrogate what might have gone wrong-for she has many theories on this point, though she doesn't know which, if any, is true. What's more, when the story ends, it's not over, necessarily, for the author still does not know what will happen next, either in her life or the life of her marriage. This is the almost real-time chronicle of the death of a marriage, an ending that felt premature to the author. I picked up this short memoir after Curtis Sittenfeld praised it during our MMD Book Club discussion of Romantic Comedy. In his case, he ran around his house and neighborhood with an old football jersey with a thunderbolt on it and a towel about his neck that served as his cape, leaping tall buildings in a single bound and vanquishing awful evildoers (and morons)-in his head-as 'The Thunderbolt Kid.' He brings us into the life of his loving but eccentric family, including affectionate portraits of his father, a gifted sportswriter for the local paper and dedicated practitioner of isometric exercises, and of his mother, whose job as the home furnishing editor for the same paper left her little time for practicing the domestic arts at home." More info → Like millions of his generational peers, Bill Bryson grew up with a rich fantasy life as a superhero. ![]() ![]() Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century-1951-in the middle of the United States-Des Moines, Iowa-in the middle of the largest generation in American history-the baby boomers. It will enchant anyone who has ever been young. From the publisher: "Warm and laugh-out-loud funny, and full of his inimitable, pitch-perfect observations, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is as wondrous a book as Bill Bryson has ever written.
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