The Parts We Left Out
For thirty-five years their father kept notebooks, including what each daughter said when the other wasn't in the room.
Two sisters, one house, dozens of notebooks: one sister left in 1991, the other stayed and cared for their father.No scandal, and that's what makes it hard to read: small truths that unsettle thirty years of stories they told about each other.Warm women's fiction about the second half of life: new work, a new apartment, a baseball summer and an unexpected late-life connection.Joanna Haskell left her Hudson Valley hometown and built a life in Chicago as a labor arbitrator, a woman who weighs two sides of a story for a living. Her older sister, Susan, stayed, raised her daughter, retired from the courts, and spent six years caring for their father in the house on Delaney Street.
When Tom Haskell dies, he leaves the house to both daughters in equal shares, along with a basement full of notebooks in a retired engineer's careful block capitals: the weather, the oil bill, who called, who visited, and every remark he thought worth keeping.
Joanna wants to sell. Susan won't say what she wants. And as the house empties box by box, the notebooks show each sister the other one she never understood.
For readers who love sister stories, family houses full of history, and novels about beginning again after fifty.
Open Look Inside and read the first pages now.
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