Will I love The Leaving Season?

Kelly tells the story of her marriage slowly unraveling and I could painfully relate to the grief and loneliness of pulling away from the "storybook" and moving into the uncharted territory of separation and single motherhood. I read this as I was still reeling as my own marriage was slowly falling to pieces. It brought me that strange comfort one has when going through a traumatic experience and someone else shares their story and suddenly you feel relieved that you are not alone and sad that someone else has felt the same pain.

Kelly’s book is one of the most honest, heartfelt accounts of how a relationship corrodes and deteriorates that I have ever encountered.

Having had a strikingly similar experience myself, I was pulled in by the story, and then I discovered her wonderful ability to interrogate the meanings of her experiences, to really consider herself as a character, and to wrestle with the complicated ethics of writing about family.

She has an anthropologist’s eye for discerning the nuanced dynamics of the cultures she immerses herself in, a novelist’s sense of story, and an essayist’s eagerness to ask difficult questions of self-implicating… show more.