lillibet | Building a Home with My Husband by Rachel Simon

reprinted from Goodreads:

I requested this from the library after hearing part of a review on NPR about it and in the first chapter I thought I was going to have difficulty liking this woman. She does a lot of things that I have little patience for--looking for a Life Purpose and taking nineteen years (including a six-year break) to figure out that she had a great guy and there's no such thing as True Love, whining about her First World Problems (oh noes, they'll have to cut their renovation plans back to only $130,000!). But the prose was very readable--except for the jarring tense shifts--and as I kept turning the pages and learned more of her story, I found myself having more compassion for Rachel Simon.

The framing device for this memoir is the renovation of their home in Wilmington, Delaware. But the real story is the personal history that Simon rehashes and the realizations that she allows to come to her through the process. She deals with that pesky Life Purpose question. She struggles with worry for her aging parents, with her own decision not to have children, with her fraught relationships with her sibling, with her ideas about commitment, and many more. She is remarkably honest about her own flaws and personal demons and brings the reader with her to new levels of understanding, even as she relates the setbacks and frustrations of the building project.

There are so many quotable passages and important life lessons that she relates along the way. But I think the one that I will really take with me is her husband's response to the question "Why me?!" which is "I think there's only one answer and that's 'Why not me?' None of us is so special that we can avoid suffering."

I think I may have to buy several copies of this book and give them to people in my life that I think would find other passages to be their favorites, who would enjoy this story of a woman rebuilding her home and her idea of herself.