"The Last Time They Met" by Anita Shreve

This was a re-read from my First Saturday Book Club years (which, if I had to guess, were 2001 through 2006, but I could be off a bit). I picked it up again recently because I hoped to flip through it and find a specific passage that I remembered, but I could NOT find it, no matter how much flipping I did. Which led me to contemplate my memory (or lack thereof), and to reminisce about other times my memory of literature failed me (I was sure Sylvia Plath wrote a poem that contained the phrase "tiny starfish hands"; apparently not. I just KNEW Elie Wiesel wrote a scene with the repeated phrase "it was not a bird" in Night, but I've never been able to find it again).

I did not re-shelve Shreve's book, and after a few days of allowing it to silently mock me and my miserable memory, I realized what I really wanted to do was to read the entire thing again, so that is what I did. 

And I enjoyed it very much. The quality of writing surprised me--not that it was bad in my memory, but I didn't remember that it was actually quite good. The story works its way backwards through the relationship between Thomas Janes and Linda Fallon, whose lives intersected when they were 52, 26 and 17. That's a really vague synopsis, I know, but I don't want to give anything away.

So after I finished this book today, I decided to read my old blog post about it... only to discover there wasn't one. So of course I am compelled to make one. Though I neither have the desire nor the energy to make it very detailed or interesting. 

Oh, and by the way--that passage I'd tried to find (but failed)? I happily succeeded in finding it during my re-read: