A chance encounter with a stranger on an airplane sends Elyse Bearden into an emotional tailspin. Suddenly Elyse is willing to risk everything: her safe but stale marriage, her seemingly perfect life in an affluent Southern suburb, and her position in the community. She finds herself cutting through all the instincts that say “no” and instead lets “yes” happen. As Elyse embarks on a risky affair, her longtime friend Kelly and the other women in their book club begin to question their own decisions about love, sex, marriage, and freedom. There are consequences for Elyse, her family, and her circle of close friends, all of whom have an investment in her life continuing as normal. But is normal what she really wants after all? In the end it will take an extraordinary leap of faith for Elyse to find–and follow–her own path to happiness. An intelligent, sexy, absorbing tale and an honest look at modern-day marriage, Love in Mid Air offers the experience of what it’s like to change the course of one’s own destiny when finding oneself caught in mid air.
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I had seen a few reviews on this book and was excited to have a chance to review it for myself. What drew me to this book was the strong friendships which has always been a draw for me – and I did really enjoy this part of the book.
I struggled with Elyce’s extra marital affair and while this is largely what the book is about, and Kim writes it with a flair and a good sense of humor, it wasn’t a topic I typically enjoy or read and stumbled a bit into a genre and language I typically do not read as well.
Going back to the friendships, that is what made the book for me – I enjoyed the conversations between the women. I liked how honest and real they could be. Since the women relationships was what I enjoyed, I asked author Kim Wright how important these characters were in the process of writing the book. Here is what Kim said:
One of the things that always frustrated me about divorce books is that they focus almost exclusively on the couple splitting up, the lover if there is one, and perhaps the kids. It’s like the whole drama goes down in a very limited environment and rarely is any attention paid to something that I think is huge, i.e., the effect that the split up has on the couple’s friends. I certainly found this in my own divorce, which was now almost 15 years ago….my husband and I were in many regards a lucky couple, with a nice home, beautiful kids, a wide social circle. When I moved out it shook up everyone, especially my girlfriends who were in similar situations. I think quite a few of them began questioning their own marriages – asking themselves exactly how happy they were, how you define “good enough,” wondering if the little cracks in their own marriage were capable of becoming the yawning chasm that had developed between my husband and me.I remember one time in particula about six months after my separation when I was out to lunch with a good friend who happened to live a very affluent lifestyle. I guess I was fretting out loud about money a little bit because when I moved out I left the house, went to an apartment, and started the challenging task of expanding what had been my part-time, supplemental writing income into enough money to support me and my kids. All of a sudden my friend looks across the table at me and says “You think I’m a complete coward, don’t you?” I didn’t think that at all but as we talked it out I began to see just how much my friends were projecting on my decision to walk out and this friend – who it turns out had many more marital doubts than I ever knew – was wondering if she could make it on her own. To be honest, I was so absorbed with my own problems during this period of my life, I was hardly thinking about anyone outside myself and my kids but this friend was convinced I was standing in judgement of her, thinking she was too materialistic or weak to make the choice I’d made.
It got me mulling over how much women live through each other’s lives and I wanted that to be in the book. Showing that Elyse’s unhappiness is a bit contagious and makes all the other women take stock of their own situations. And of course with her best friend Kelly the bond is especially strong since they’ve known each other since high school and have always seen each other as sort of the “path not taken.” There’s a point in the book where Elyse is remembering something that Kelly went through years earlier, a man who left her abruptly and broke her heart. Elyse thinks. “She was my best friend. It happened to her and so, in a way, it happened to both of us.” And I believe this is very true of female friendships. We talk more. We share things. We are entwined in each other’s destinies in a way male friends rarely are.
Of course when the book came out I was a little nervous since the women in the book club are based on women I know – women who were in my own book club years ago, in fact. They’re amalgamated and changed and reimagined but fiction always contains little shards of real life so I was worried that a couple of people might feel I betrayed their confidence or represented their position on marriage and motherhood unfairly. But so far only one person has gotten upset and she was mad because she didn’t see herself anywhere in the book!
Currently I am working on the sequel to Love in Mid Air, and this time it’s told from Kelly’s point of view. As a writer I’m having a lot of fun exploring how Kelly’s memories and interpretations of events differ from Elyse’s. So in the new book she is the main character going through a crisis and Elyse is the sidekick, the loyal friend who is running around trying to keep her out of trouble. The epigraph is a line by Elie Wiesel that goes “Friendship, in the end, marks our life even more deeply than love.” I so much believe that.
I received this book from the author
Kim Wright has been writing about travel, food, and wine for more than 25 years and is a two-time recipient of the Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Writing.
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