A Year and Six Seconds: A Love Story

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The Isabel Gillies we meet about the beginning of this memoir should be at the end of her tether. Her husband has recently abandoned her for another woman and now, with two toddlers and luggage in tow, she's arriving at a New York City airport, faced with the prospect with living again with her parents. That entrance does sound like the beginning of a brisk, even hilarious single mom memoir, but this sequel to Gillies' strong selling Happens Every Day possesses a winning feistiness that any reader with a soul can appreciate. The former CSI: Special Victims Unit actress doesn't simply win back her self-confidence and independence step-by-stumbling step; she finds new romance in the City That Never Sleeps.

Kirkus Reviews

Part two of Gillies' (Happens Every Day, 2009) chatty, bittersweet chronicle of loss and renewal.

"I had to get my shit together," writes the disillusioned author, who, in this memoir sequel, plods onward and incrementally upward after separating from her husband in Ohio, taking her two sons and moving in with her parents in New York City. Separation agreement official and wedding band removed (the area replaced with an angry rash), Gillies ruefully struggled with modern city life after picking up the pieces of a shattered life once her husband Josiah left her to marry another woman. Her situation alternately cheerless and "exciting" (the dating scene!), Gillies interviewed schools and babysitters, revived a recurring role on Law & Order and uncomfortably shared split vacations and custody with Josiah for the sake of the boys. Romantically determined to rediscover that coveted "deep purple, electrifying, all-consuming and painful love," she blind dated via e-mail and tested an old friend's capacity for love. With the same self-effacing prose found in her debut, Gillies describes her journey from the pain of lost love to the land of the living with humor and compassion. Too often, however, the self-described "drama queen" waxes melodramatically, like she was the first and only survivor of a heart-wrenching divorce. Readers who enjoyed the author's earlier memoir—and books like it—will find her saga engrossing and heartfelt, though the writing remains scruffy and rambling. Gillies still wants love at first sight (again), but one year later, will it still only take six seconds to happen? Readers will cheer along with the author, whose heart overflows in the conclusion of this enduring story of life after love.

The writing is uneven, and the author strains for material in the final chapters, but there's plenty of love, humor and hope to spare.

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