Looking Back - A False Sense of Well Being

Looking Back... In an effort to transfer my book journal entries over to this blog, I'm going to attempt to post (in chronological order) an entry every Friday. I may or may not add extra commentary to what I jotted down in these journals.

A False Sense of Well Being by Jeanne Braselton

Fiction

2001 Ballantine Books

Finished on January 19, 2002

Rating: 2/5 (Fair)

Publisher's Blurb:

“I was married eleven years before I started imagining how different life could be if my husband were dead. . . .”

At thirty-eight, Jessie Maddox subscribes to House Beautiful, Southern Living, even Psychology Today. She has a comfortable life in Glenville, Georgia, with Turner, the most reliable, responsible husband in the world. But after the storybook romance, “happily ever after” never came. Now the housewife who once wanted to be Martha Stewart before there was a Martha Stewart is left to wonder: Where did the marriage go wrong? Why can’t she stop picturing herself as the perfect grieving widow?

As Jessie dives headlong into her midlife crisis, she is aided and abetted by a colorful cast of characters in the true Southern her best friend and next door neighbor Donna, who is having a wild adulterous affair with a younger man; Wanda McNab, the sweater-knitting, cookie-baking grandmother who is charged with killing her abusive husband. Then there’s Jessie’s eccentric family. Her younger sister Ellen, born to be a guest on Jerry Springer, has taken her seven-year-old son and squawking pet birds and left her husband “for good this time” . . . while their mother crosses the dirty words out of library books and alerts everyone to the wonderful bargains at Winn-Dixie, often at the same time. And then there’s the stuffed green headless duck . . .

When a trip home to the small town of her childhood raises more questions than it answers, Jessie is forced to face the startling truth head-on–and confront the tragedy that has shadowed her heart and shaken her faith in love . . . and the future.

From a brilliant new voice in fiction, here is a darkly comic novel full of revelation and insight. The danger of secrets and the power of confession . . . The pull of family, no matter how crazy. . . The fate of wedlock when one can’t find the key . . . Jeanne Braselton weaves these potent themes into a funny, poignant, utterly engaging story of a woman at the crossroads–and the unforgettable journey she must take to get back home.

My Original Thoughts (2002):

Starts off weakly. I think the author is trying to be funny, but I don't see it that way. I'll keep plugging away.

Thought this book was a waste of time. Pretty pointless and dull. Don't recommend and won't read more by this author. 

My Current Thoughts:

I don't know why this book appealed to me, but after a little digging, I discovered that Braselton was good friends with Kaye Gibbons, Anne Rivers Siddons, and Lee Smith. I read a lot of southern fiction in the early 2000s, and this book was probably mentioned in a magazine or somewhere online.

I came across the following (on Georgia Center for the Book), which is rather sad and depressing:

Jeanne Braselton was a Georgia native whose semi-autobiographical debut novel "A False Sense of Well Being" (2001) was widely acclaimed and won her the Georgia Writer of the Year Award in 2002. She committed suicide before her second book was completed by her friend and fellow writer Kaye Gibbons and published in 2006.

Jeanne Braselton was born in Fort Oglethorpe in 1962. She was the adopted daughter of a poet who was a chief of the Cherokee nation and who gave her a love of the written word. She received a B.S. in English from Berry College in Rome in 1983. She worked as a commercial bank marketing executive but spent most of her working life as a reporter and editor for the Rome News-Tribune newspaper, for which she received a number of Georgia Press Association awards. She was married to the poet Al Braselton, a close friend of the late poet James Dickey and the source for one of Dickey's characters in the novel "Deliverance." He died in 2002.

Jeanne Braselton enrolled in a creative writing class in Rome that led her to correspond with and become friends with a number of regional writers including Kaye Gibbons, Anne Rivers Siddons and Lee Smith. With their encouragement, she wrote her first novel. The book is about a woman who is devoted to her loving but boring husband, and who, after suffering a miscarriage, becomes fixated on ways to bring about his death. There are autobiographical elements in the novel; Braselton had several miscarriages during her marriage. The book sold well; one critic called it "regional fiction at its best," and there were predictions of a long literary career for her.

But less than a year after her husband's death in 2002, a despondent author took her own life at the couple's home in Rome. Her second book, "The Other Side of Air," was completed by Gibbons and released in 2006." She had written a lot that was unusable," Gibbons said of Braselton's novel. "I started over using an e-mail she sent me when she started it about what her plans were. She was thinking clearly then, and it was realistic, and I used that for a model."