READERS, Would You Read More?
Exploring Generational Family Dysfunction: A Synopsis
Adultery is pervasive in our culture yet often reduced to cliché. Isn’t the adulterer always the bad guy? Kate Winslet’s 2006 Academy Award nominated performance in Little Children takes on this stigma in her role as Sarah, a stay-at-home mom desperate for attention her husband can’t or won’t give her. For the first time in our culture, women are leaving marriages at record rates; the exodus led by middle age women emptying their family nests. Whether this trend is driven by economics that have empowered more women or purely a quality of life issue, wives are leaving long term marriages instead of staying put as their mothers once did.
In The SweetSpot, Darlene Robinson takes readers through a transforming year in her life that begins with attendance at her first writers’ conference and ends there one year later. She is a woman in transition; a mother of two almost grown boys, a daughter losing her mother, a wife facing the truth about her marriage; a love starved little girl that seeks the shelter of a man who touches her in ways her husband can’t or won’t.
The SweetSpot is a multi-generational story about family dysfunction that explores how sins of one generation get passed along to the next. Darlene Robinson doesn’t want her boys to settle as her parents did. By instinct, she knows she must show them a different way and so she begins the unraveling of a life established with her husband Norman when they were just teenagers.
Though Mama taught her better, when you’re starved for the touch of a man as long as Darlene had been, something happens to that part inside of you that knows better. The part of you starving sees to that and so Darlene embarked down a road that began when she met Clive Charles at the writers’ conference. By the time she met him, it had been years since Norman had touched her. Years of living a celibate life she wanted no part of. It wasn’t like she didn’t try to change his mind because she did, even pleaded with him ‘Norman, I need more. You gotta start touching me. Gotta start making me feel like a woman. These things are important’ but they weren’t important to Norman Robinson.
Darlene was fairly certain she wouldn’t have done what she did with a man who wasn’t her husband had Mama not died. But when you watch your mother’s body turn to worm, watch lips always painted pink turn the color of death, a ghoulish gray that keeps you from kissing her on the mouth even though you desperately want to kiss her because you know soon you’ll never be able to kiss her again, something happens to you inside. At least it did to Darlene.
The SweetSpot is a fast paced twenty-one chapter story that is written in scenes and will resonate with readers able to identify with family dysfunction where there are no real bad guys and everybody’s wounded.
