The Stuff That Never Happened…is happening

The Stuff That Never Happened is coming out on August 3rd, 2010, published by Crown Publishing.

Can two people hold a secret between them for their whole lives and just pretend it never happened?

Annabelle and Grant McKay have been married for 28 years and seem like the happiest couple anybody would ever want to meet. But here’s the thing about them: they met when they were very young and got married quickly because Grant had accepted a position across the country.  To save on expenses, they moved in with another young couple and their children.

And during that time, something devastating happened which changed the course of their marriage forever.

In time, they recovered and moved on.  But Grant’s condition for forgiving Annabelle was that they would never speak again of what had happened. They would move away and live in his family homestead in New Hampshire, where they would raise a family and learn to trust and love each other again.

It worked.  They had two children, Annabelle became an artist and Grant a respected professor, and their house was the place in town where all the kids liked to hang out. They were in love, busy, successful, and happy.

But now, once the kids have left home, Annabelle realizes that she hasn’t really gotten over what happened to them back at the beginning of their marriage. Grant has thrown himself into his work, barely masking the anger he feels toward her–and with the nest suddenly empty and her husband grown cold, she starts to wonder if perhaps they made the right decision after all. And when her daughter needs her to come help her deal with a difficult pregnancy, Annabelle is thrown into a situation that forces her to rethink everything she thought she knew about love and marriage and family happiness.

The story is a quiet, introspective look at marriage and parenthood, and it alternates between the past, when the event happened, and the present day, when the repercussions of pretending it never occurred take place.  It’s a book about life and love and living with decisions you’ve made in the past.

Above all, it’s an affirming exploration of what we choose and what we choose to leave behind.

In Annabelle’s words,  “Maybe this is common. Perhaps the whole human race goes around with an ache like this. Maybe we’re all dreaming of a person from the tantalizing past who sits there, uninvited, watching from the edge of our consciousness, somebody you find packing up and moving out of your head just as you’re waking up in the morning, and whose essence clings to you all day as though you have spent the night with him, wandering off together somewhere among the stars, making out on strangers’ couches and in train stations and football stadiums, laughing over things that make no sense at all.”

Read an excerpt from the book right here.