From the back cover:
Lanie Coates's life is spinning out of control. She's piled everything she owns into a U-Haul and driven across the country with her husband, Peter, and their three little boys. She's left family, friends, and a comfortable life behind - all so her husband can realize his dream of becoming a professional musician. But somewhere in the eye of her personal hurricane it hits Lanie that she once had dreams, too. If only she could remember what they were.
Now, fifteen years, three babies, and more pounds than she's willing to count since she said "I do," Lanie desperately longs to feel like her old self again. It's time to fish her moxie out of the diaper pail and find the woman she was before motherhood capsized her entire existence. So Lanie sets change in motion - accidentally creativing waves that come to threaten everything she holds dear. In the end, Lanie must figure out once and for all how to find herself without losing everything else in the process.
When Lanie and her husband Peter pack up their boys and move from Texas to Cambridge, Mass., Lanie is just going through the motions. She doesn't have any plans for herself except to follow her 3 boys around, while her husband chases his dreams. While Peter is holed up in the house giving lessons, writing music and practicing, Lanie is hitting the parks and trying to navigate her way through a brand new city. She is delighted to discover a friend from high school, Amanda, lives in town. Amanda and her daughter become her saving grace and they meet up regularly. Shortly after Lanie is asked that dreaded question by another woman, "So, when are you due?" when she is not pregnant, Lanie becomes slightly obsessed with her body and joins a gym down the street. And that becomes her nightly routine after putting the boys to bed - a whole hour at the gym, just by herself, for herself.
Life takes a turn for Lanie when she receives her mother's old cameras in the mail and rediscovers her artisitic side. It doesn't take her long to get swept up in the world of photography, and she sets out taking photos of anything and everything. As she becomes more passionate about photography, she sets a goal to take and compile a book of photos on beautiful women.
With Lanie buried in her new found passion of photography, she continues to drift further away from her husband Peter, who she has been with for 15 years. She is also so wrapped up in her activities that she realizes, a little too late, that her photography instructor is in love with her. When he kisses her one night and Peter witnesses it, Lanie fears it is the end of their marriage. Unfortunately, Peter is off to California that night for a 3-week-long fellowship in his graduate program.
Lanie feels every emotion while he is gone, and when her family shows up from out of town, she begins to realize what she's been missing with Peter since they had children 4 years ago. She sets out on a red-eye flight to surprise her husband and tell him to come home. After Peter hears a bizarre and untrue tale of Lanie's sadness from her friend Amanda, he sets out for the airport himself and almost misses his wife. The two talk - really talk - for the first time in the entire novel and rediscover what made them fall in love in the first place.
I loved this book. (Maybe even better than her first book, The Bright Side of Disaster, which I reviewed here.) I felt like I was there with Lanie, watching her just move through each day until she found her own passion again. Then it was like watching a woman with tunnel vision. She was so consumed with photography that she forgot other things in life. But she came out a better person in the end because she found herself again. Perhaps my favorite part of the book was this part at the very end of the novel:
And here, after all that, is what I have come to believe about beauty: Laughter is beautiful. Kindness is beautiful. Cellulite is beautiful. Softness and plumpness and roundness are beautiful. Big boobs should have a big ass to go with them. It's more important to be interesting, to be vivid, and to be adventurous, than to sit pretty for pictures. A woman's soft tummy is a miracle of nature. Beauty comes from tenderness. Beauty comes from variety, from specificity, from the fact that no person in the world looks exactly like anyone else. Beauty comes from the tragedy that each person's life is destined to be lost to time. I believe women are too hard on themselves. I believe that when you love someone, she becomes beautiful to you. I believe the eyes see everything through the heart - and nothing in the world feels as good as resting them on someone you love.
Everyone is Beautiful will be released on February 17, 2009. I highly recommend reading it!
