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By Sue Miller
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 2000
In her still startling debut, The Good Mother, Sue Miller explored the premium we put on passion--and the terrible burden it
places on a mother and child. Her fourth novel, While I Was Gone, is another study in familial crime and punishment. But this
time, her wife and good mother is accessory to more than emotional malfeasance. Jo Becker has everything a woman could desire:
a loving spouse, contented children, and a nice dog or two. When her New England veterinary practice takes on a new client,
however, her past comes back to haunt her. Long ago, it seems, Jo had escaped her family and identity for a commune in Cambridge.
Her Aquarian illusions came to an abrupt, bloody end when one of her housemates was brutally murdered.
Now this unhappy era returns in the person of Eli Mayhew, who had been the odd man out in Jo's boho household. His appearance
is both tantalizing and upsetting: "Inside, I slowed down. I felt numbed. I had two last patients, and then I told Beattie to
go home, that I'd close up.... I refiled the last charts, sprayed and wiped the examining table. I reviewed my list of routine
surgeries for Wednesday. All the while I was thinking of Eli Mayhew, and of Dana and Larry and Duncan and me, and our lives in
the house. Of the horrible way it had all ended." Sue Miller's fine novel is a penetrating--and sensuous--portrait of a woman
besieged by her conscience. While I Was Gone also demonstrates that in the face of distance and betrayal, a little knowledge can
be a dangerous thing indeed.
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