Product Description

With insight and intelligence, Sue Miller explores the intricates of family and love

Lottie Gardner, her brother, Cameron, and their childhood friend Elizabeth have all come together in their hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, after years of separation. Lottie is barraged with memories of the past as she packs up her mother's house and witnesses the rekindling of an old romance between Cameron and Elizabeth. When a senseless tragedy intrudes upon them, Lottie is forced to examine the consequences of what she has done for love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64549 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-01
• Released on: 1999-01-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Perhaps because her work ( The Good Mother ; Family Pictures ) is seductively readable and sells so well, Miller has been underrated as a serious writer. Yet she tackles important themes and creates complex characters who must confront weaknesses in their own natures to come to terms with the conditions of their lives. This novel is her best to date, a forceful and resonant portrayal of a woman who is trying to escape from her past. Lottie and Cameron Reed and Elizabeth Harbour grew up in Cambridge, Mass., the Reeds in a ramshackle house across the street from the Harbour's elegant manse--a social chasm they became aware of as teenagers. Circumstances now bring them back together: her second marriage in jeopardy, Lottie has flown from Chicago to clean out her mother's possessions; self-absorbed, glamorous Elizabeth has fled a marital crisis; and Cameron, who has always adored Elizabeth, rekindles their old romance. The Reed siblings are emotionally dysfunctional, due in part to their impoverished childhoods as offspring of a father who was imprisoned for embezzlement and an alcoholic, abusive mother. Independent, willful but vulnerable, Lottie suffers from repressed rage and guilt, unconscious denial and an inability to give or accept love. A tragedy brings the various relationships into collision. Miller's writing is controlled, authoritative and charged with meaning; she excels in creating credibly flawed but appealing characters while exploring a larger question: Is love possible in the post-Freudian age? BOMC main selection.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Fortyish freelance writer Lottie leaves her new husband in Chicago to spend part of the summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, getting the family house ready to sell now that her brother Cameron has placed their alcoholic mother in a nursing home. While she and her son Ryan paint and clean, Lottie examines the concept of love in an article she is writing, studying her own troubled marriage and Cameron's resumption of a love affair with childhood sweetheart Elizabeth. For Elizabeth, who is staying with her mother after leaving her philandering husband, this romance is just a fling. But Cameron's obsessive love for the golden girl of his youth leads to the tragic accident at the center of this affecting story. Through the intelligent and captivating character of Lottie, Miller ( Family Pictures, LJ 4/15/90) explores the world of relationships with astonishing insight to create an engrossing, rewarding novel. Highly recommended.
- Patricia Ross, Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Here, the author of Family Pictures (1990), etc., graces us with nothing less than a disputation on the nature of love--from whence, at least in Miller's world, all other emotions (and a great deal of often extreme behavior) come. This time out, her extraordinarily intelligent, if agonized, protagonist is Charlotte Reed, a nonfiction writer and divorc‚e with a grown son, Ryan, and new husband, Jack, a widowed oncologist. But as the story begins, Charlotte's left Jack, presumably to get her aging mother's Cambridge home in shape to be sold--since her brother, Cam, has put their mother in a home. Charlotte's other reason for flying the coop is that she doesn't think she can hack the new marriage: Jack's teenaged daughter is a pain, and Jack himself seems unable to stop grieving for his first wife. And her real reason, she comes to understand, has to do with being afraid that she doesn't love Jack the way she used to. She yearns for a kind of wild, romantic love, and sees it in the way her brother behaves with his new flame, Elizabeth, a neighbor in Cambridge. Elizabeth has returned home because her husband is playing around. She starts doing so, too, with Cam, though for him the relationship is less a fling than an expression of his unbalanced approach to life. Tragedy strikes in the form of an accident that kills Elizabeth's au pair girl, with Cam behind the wheel. Her death sets Charlotte off on an intense emotional hegira, which eventually leads her back to Jack and a different kind of love--a love that has as much loss in it as passion. Seared by several extraordinary arguments--between Lottie and Cam and others--and by a handful of characterizations so full that they suggest whole novels revolving around Miller's secondaries. Miller's special brand of intelligent emotionalism reaches its zenith here: it's deep, resonant, splendid. (Book-of-the-Month Main Selection for April) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Not Miller's best, but still interesting characters & story
"For Love" takes place over the course of a summer in Boston. Lottie is struggling with her second marriage and she's using the summer to figure out what she wants. She and her grown son Ryan spend the summer preparing her childhood home for sale, while her husband Jack stays home in Chicago. Meanwhile, her brother Cameron rekindles his high school romance (obsession) with Elizabeth, who has since married but has returned to her parents house down the block from Lottie, also deciding whether to leave her husband. Elizabeth, who was never nice to Lottie as a teenager, tries to befriend Lottie, putting her in the middle of a difficult relationship between her and Cameron.

Sue Miller's books tend to start the reader out in the middle of a story, and as the action progresses, we learn about the main character's past through flashbacks. She uses this technique here as well, and I think it generally works. In the first chapter, Cameron accidently runs over Elizabeth's au pair in a wild attempt to keep her from returning to her husband. That sets the stage to show us how this affects Lottie and what led to this event. Over the course of the book, we learn that Lottie met her second husband Jack while his wife was deeply ill and that their relationship is in many ways defined by the slow death of his wife. We learn that Lottie's father was arrested for embezzlement when she was a child, and she grew up with her alcoholic mother, both angry at her and guilty for being favored over Cameron. Yet Cameron has become the devoted one, looking after their mother as she deteriorates in the nursing home. We learn that Lottie takes pride in growing up without wealth, for having tacky taste, for not going the conventional route, and yet she chooses Jack, who is a doctor, with money and refined tastes. All of this (and more) figures in how Lottie eventually makes her decision and, perhaps, comes to accept herself.

This is my third book by Sue Miller, and like her others, it has interesting and complex characters and it has many insights about human behavior. But while I found Lottie's journey is interesting, this book didn't affect me as much as "While I Was Gone" or "The Good Mother." The story felt a little disjoint at times -- it seemed like if you put the story back in chronological order, there would be some important periods missing. I sometimes felt that I didn't understood Lottie's emotional development and the reasons she made the choices she did. At the end, although I expected Lottie to make the decision she did, I didn't really understand why from her point of view. Still, I liked Lottie's unconventional ways and I appreciated the emotional complexity of her character. It's not my favorite of Miller's book, but I wasn't sorry I read it.

Not Miller's Best
While I have liked some of Sue Miller's books ("The Good Mother" and "Inventing the Abbotts"), this one was very unsatisfying to me (as was "While I Was Gone"). I never felt that I knew the characters and because of this, could not understand their motivation. It was as though I was viewing them through a cloudy lens...the characterizatons just never were clear.

I tried to feel sympathy or even empathy for Lottie and Cameron, but could never muster any. They just never really engaged me as a reader.

Also, parts of their history and background seemed to be missing, as if lost in all of the changes of time that Miller used.

I will try "Family Pictures" next.....hope I can get more involved.

For Love: Thought Provoking
For Love is a subdued, mature chronicle of a woman coming to terms with adult relationships. This book tells the story of Lottie, a woman haunted by her and her new husband's pasts. The tone is detached with the author perhaps purposefully distancing the readers from intense emotion. Themes in the book include love (of course) both romantic and familial, identity, loyalty, maturation, and conscious living. It is not a tale packed with action-- though it decidedly lures us with a "what will ever happen?" plot thread. Sue Miller nimbly and impressively weaves the plot back and forth through time and through the emotional state of the protaganist (Lottie). It is a first person account told in third person (hence the distancing). This device may be used to emulate the lack of connection and knowledge Lottie has with and of herself. This book presents the simple unfolding of a story completed with brilliant technique and subtlety. Would I recommend this book? Yes. It contains simple life truths which provoke soul searching and contemplation. To whom would I recommend it? Patient readers. Those willing to take the time to meander with the author and the protangonist through the often stream of consciousness narration. Was this book life changing for me? Yes. It helped me wrap my mind around two ideas that while very intuitive seemed very fresh and enrichming for me: 1) When we love people, that love will either stretch to include all different versions of them as they grow and change, or it won't... lasting love takes work in that regard. How is this work done? This leads me to idea # 2) Sometimes we have to pretend to love the changed version of a person we once loved (or pretend to embrace the true nature person who we idealized as something else) until that love can adapt and become a reality. Will this book change the way I live? It will change my perspective. If the book's philosophy is correct and thought follow actions... then yes... it will have changed my life. I enjoyed this book for it's unlikely marriage of depth and simplicity.