Lost in the Forest
Sue Miller
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1400042267
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For nearly two decades, since the publication of her iconic first novel, The Good Mother, Sue Miller has distinguished herself as one of our most elegant and widely celebrated chroniclers of family life, with a singular gift for laying bare the interior lives of her characters. In each of her novels, Miller has written with exquisite precision about the experience of grace in daily life–the sudden, epiphanic recognition of the extraordinary amid the ordinary–as well as the sharp and unexpected motions of the human heart away from it, toward an unruly netherworld of upheaval and desire. But never before have Miller’s powers been keener or more transfixing than they are in Lost in the Forest, a novel set in the vineyards of Northern California that tells the story of a young girl who, in the wake of a tragic accident, seeks solace in a damaging love affair with a much older man.
Eva, a divorced and happily remarried mother of three, runs a small bookstore in a town north of San Francisco. When her second husband, John, is killed in a car accident, her family’s fragile peace is once again overtaken by loss. Emily, the eldest, must grapple with newfound independence and responsibility. Theo, the youngest, can only begin to fathom his father’s death. But for Daisy, the middle child, John’s absence opens up a world of bewilderment, exposing her at the onset of adolescence to the chaos and instability that hover just beyond the safety of parental love. In her sorrow, Daisy embarks on a harrowing sexual odyssey, a journey that will cast her even farther out onto the harsh promontory of adulthood and lost hope.
With astonishing sensuality and immediacy, Lost in the Forest moves through the most intimate realms of domestic life, from grief and sex to adolescence and marriage. It is a stunning, kaleidoscopic evocation of a family in crisis, written with delicacy and masterful care. For her lifelong fans and those just discovering Sue Miller for the first time, here is a rich and gorgeously layered tale of a family breaking apart and coming back together again: Sue Miller at her inimitable best.
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are right to hate her. Who wouldn’t? “An hour, then,” she says. Daisy protests. “One hour. That’s it. If it’s not done, it’s just not done.” As she crosses the hall to the kitchen she can hear them begin their low murmurs of contempt for her. She turns on the overhead light and winces at the reflected sight of herself in the glass of the French doors—her dark hair frazzling gray, her face white and pouchy. She opens the refrigerator and stands in its exhalation of cool, slightly
crown of her head, but it showed darkly, damply at her scalp. Her lipstick was gone, and her face seemed to him somehow innocent, generous, without it. “Oh wine, delicious wine,” she cried when he handed her the bag. She lifted the bottles out and looked at the labels. “Man, you shouldn’t have,” she said, grinning. She knew these little wineries because of what they were doing to real estate values in a way that paralleled Mark’s knowledge of them for what they were doing to prices in the wine
saw.” “Hundreds and hundreds?” Emily said, in a teasing voice. Daisy stopped and turned. She waited for them to catch up to her. “You’re a liar, Theo,” she said. Her voice was low and threatening. Emily made a face at Daisy: let him talk. What’s the big deal? But Daisy wanted him to shut up. “He’s imagining stuff again.” “I’m not ’magining.” “Yeah? You’re always imagining stuff. Just like you imagine John is alive, when he’s dead.” Emily said, “Cut it out, Daisy,” just as Theo was saying,
pulling a gondola full, waiting in the long lines of tourist traffic to make a turn, fretting about the rising heat, the time wasting. And yet, without the tourists, his work would have been worth less. Far less. He had a rental car in Santa Fe, and when he got tired of strolling into the shops and galleries and churches and restaurants near the plaza, he drove out into the surrounding country on several days, watching the dry land roll and change. He stopped three times at Indian pueblos and
pair of responses as they seem. But each of them does, truly, have resources that Daisy doesn’t, and they suffer less because of this. JMG: Smatterings of the adult Daisy are sprinkled throughout the book, particularly in her references to Dr. Gerard. What made you decide to imbue some of Daisy’s narrative voice with the knowledge of how things turn out? Why do you allow a decade to elapse between the second-to-last and the final chapter of the novel? SM: I think my impulse was to answer the