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A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
An NPR Best Book of the Year
“We are all so curious. Hungry for the truth. If only we could ask the questions we really want to ask of each other and get the real answers. Like how many times a month do you have sex? What prescription drugs are you on? Are you happy? Really happy? Happy enough?”
For anybody who has ever wondered privately Is this all there is, Melanie Gideon’s poignant, hilarious, exuberant meditation, The Slippery Year, chronicles a year in which she confronts both the fantasies of her receding youth and the realities of midlife with a husband, a child, and a dog (one of whom runs away). She reflects on the exigencies of domesticity–the need for a household catastrophe plan, the fainting spell occasioned by the departure of her nine-year-old son for camp, the mattress wars, and the carpool line. With tenderness, unsparing honesty, and uproarious wit, Gideon brings us back again and again to the sweetness of ordinary pleasures and to life’s most enduring satisfactions. She captures perfectly that moment right before everything changes and the things we have loved forever begin to fall away for the first time.
The Slippery Year is the story of a woman’s quest to reignite passion, beauty, and mystery and discover if “happily ever after” is a possibility after all.
Reviews
“A love song to her family and to life. . . what a lovely song it is. . . One of the happiest books to cross our paths in a long time.”
—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“There is nothing contrived, trite, or holier-than-thou in this crisply hilarious, candid, and affecting contemplation. Instead, Gideon’s self deprecating and wry insights into the mysteries of marriage, parenthood and the evolution of the self are astute, pragmatic, and generous, providing the perfect antidote to the everyday blues.”
–Donna Seaman, Booklist
“By the end of the book I felt like I had just spent several hours knocking back drinks with an especially funny friend. Which is some of my highest praise.”
–New Yorker Book Bench, Andrea Walker
Like all the best books, The Slippery Year reminds us that we are not alone–not alone in our fears about our kids, not alone in our struggle to make meaning of our lives, and most definitely not alone in our volcanic rages about the car pool line. Melanie Gideon is a wonderful companion–smart, rueful and painfully funny. Truly, the one thing wrong with this book is that it had to end.
—Allison Pearson, Author of I Don’t Know How She Does it
Within hours of finishing The Slippery Year, I was raving to friends about its perfect balance of gorgeous writing, quirky wit, and lovable impertinences. I laughed and cried and saw myself in Melanie Gideon’s chronicle of maternal neuroses and wifely doubts. What a pleasure to find such a dear and funny book.
—Elinor Lipman, author of The Family Man and Then She Found Me
In this marvelous memoir Ms. Gideon appears to be channeling everything I’ve ever felt, thought, feared, hoped about motherhood.
—Ayelet Waldman, author of Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace
Funny, wrenching and spot-on. Get ready to weep and laugh. Gideon weaves a kind of magic here, polishing the days until they gleam like gold.
—Julia Scheeres, author of Jesus Land
Ever wonder what’s running through your wife’s mind? Read The Slippery Year. Gideon has an utterly charming way of turning the constant compromises of married life into riotous poetic insight.
—Po Bronson, author of NurtureShock
With courage, poignancy, and abundant hilarity, Melanie Gideon explores the ambivalence that inevitably surfaces when we choose to stick it out with the loves of our lives. Readers with find themselves laughing out loud and nodding with recognition as they slide through The Slippery Year.
—Giulia Melucci, author of I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti
Melanie Gideon has reinvented the coming-of-age memoir, and done so with self-deprecation, intelligence, and wit. Gideon’s writing reminded me of the best of Nick Hornby, at turns sweet, then dark, then almost desperate for connection. Despite all obstacles she finds it, within her family, and surely now with scads of readers. The Slippery Year is a terrific book.
—Tom Barbash, author of The Last Good Chance
Melanie Gideon’s “The Slippery Year” tackles the tough topic of ‘feeling empty’ in the midst of a seemingly comfortable and contented California life. Gideon explores her pain, doubt, regret and confusion as a mother and wife with great poise and insight, and ultimately, a gentle aura of home.
— Lisa Shea, Elle
. . . A hilariously probing account of personal growth and stasis. Epiphanies abound in Gideon’s account, and the author takes those small lessons and effectively analyzes them in ways useful to a large readership. Women in particular will appreciate her musings on motherhood . . . and the healthy dose of self-loathing that informs the author’s sarcasm and warm sense of irony as she reckons with her burgeoning eccentricities. . . refreshing and sassy, with more than a dash of tenderness thrown in.
—Kirkus Reviews