More Than Enough

A woman discovers surprising secrets about her family;and about her best friend in a wonderfully wise novel of life, love, loss, and moving on--from the #1 When her book club gives high school English teacher Polly an ancestry test on a whim, it matches her with a teenage girl named Talia. Despite it seeming clear that this match is a mistake, Polly cannot help combing through her own family history for answers as she also begins to bond with and mentor Talia. In the process, Polly confronts her complicated relationship with her mother, opening old wounds even as Polly struggles to start a family of her own.; Meanwhile, her best friend Sarah privately reveals that she has an incurable disease, leaving Polly at sea as she balances Sarah’s secret, her own grief around the news, and the crushing personal disappointment of failed IVF treatments. Always, though, Polly’s closeknit book club group and her steadfast husband are there to support her, even as she comes to a new understanding of the life she has built and what family and friendship can mean. Written with Quindlen''s storytelling magic, as well as her warmth, humor, and insight into families, friendship, and the power of love and hope, <More Than Enough< explores how we find ourselves again and again through the relationships that define us.

Autorentext

Anna Quindlen is the author of many books, including the #1 New York Times bestselling novel Rise and Shine, the #1 bestselling memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, A Short Guide to a Happy Life, and the Oprah’s Book Club selection Black and Blue. Her other novels include Blessings, One True Thing, Still Life with Bread Crumbs, and After Annie.

Klappentext

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Quindlen is as observant and as wonderfully readable as ever, attuned to women’s lives and the nuances of their voices.”—Jennifer Weiner, The New York Times Book Review

A woman confronts the surprising results of an ancestry test and begins to question the meaning of family and friendship in this wise, tender novel teeming with life—from the beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author of After Annie**

No one knows you like your book club.

High school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they’ve become her closest friends and, along with her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her students, her fraught relationship with her mother, her struggles with IVF—Polly’s book club friends have heard about it all.

But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. It is clear to Polly that this match is a mistake, but still she cannot help but comb through her family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways.

Written with Anna Quindlen’s trademark warmth, humor, and insight into the power of love and hope, More Than Enough explores how we find ourselves again and again through the relationships that define us.

Zusammenfassung
A woman confronts the surprising results of an ancestry test and begins to question the meaning of family and friendship in this wise, tender novel teeming with life—from the beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author of After Annie

No one knows you like your book club.

High school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they’ve become her closest friends and, along with her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her students, her fraught relationship with her mother, her struggles with IVF—Polly’s book club friends have heard about it all.

But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. It is clear to Polly that this match is a mistake, but still she cannot help but comb through her family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways.

Written with Anna Quindlen’s trademark warmth, humor, and insight into the power of love and hope, More Than Enough explores how we find ourselves again and again through the relationships that define us.

Leseprobe
I’d said I would tell them everything.

“Everything,” Jamie had said. “Everything.” That’s Jamie’s conversational tic, that she repeats everything for emphasis. Everything.

“I promise to tell you when I get the results,” I’d said at the time, whacking off a wedge of cheese. The lingering hormones in my system make me ravenous, then nauseous, then ravenous again, and emotional for no reason I can reliably predict. I cry at subway delays and TV ads. I buy impulsively at white sales. I have a small apartment and seven decorative quilts.

“I think we all need to remember that we gave Polly this DNA kit in the first place as a joke,” Sarah had said. “It wasn’t serious. We didn’t give it to her to pressure her into anything.”

“I’m fine with pressuring Polly,” Jamie said.

I’d said I would tell them everything, but that was a month ago, when we had my birthday celebration at Helen’s apartment. A party hat, a chocolate cupcake, a small square package with foil wrapping and ribbons, then a larger one as well. “I’ll report back,” I’d said then about the DNA test. Ethnicity, genetic makeup, long-lost family members. While Jamie rolled her eyes and Helen mentioned someone at her law firm who had taken the same test and discovered she was part Russian, Sarah, always looking out for me, had said again, “No pressure at all. Just for fun.”

I can feel the folded sheet of paper in my tote bag now, and it doesn’t feel like fun. It feels incandescent, as though the three of them will be able to see it glowing like a lightning bug under a leaf stuck beneath my course notes, a folder of essays, my computer, and the fancy needlepoint clutch in which I keep my tampons, because despite all our efforts, Mark’s and mine and the doctors’, I am not pregnant.

I don’t know why I printed out a paper copy of the test results. I guess it was that it would make them feel more real, when part of me wanted them to simply disappear, to go back to the evening in the bathroom when I stuck that stupid swab in my mouth and rotated it inside my cheek, just behind where my girlhood dimples used to be before they turned into the divots of forty. The paraphernalia from that little just-for-fun gift box had been stacked on the side of the sink the same way all the pregnancy tests had been, and the ovulation predictors. I take more tests than my students at the Windsor School do.

Sarah and Helen and especially Jamie want me to tell them everything, everything that’s on that sheet of paper in my tote bag. But I’m not ready to do that, not yet. Which is why, a month on from that birthday celebration, I’m standing frozen at the door of Sarah’s apartment listening to the faint sounds of the three of them talking inside.

It sounds like a symphony of conversation, Helen low and melodious, Sarah interjecting from time to time in her high, sweet voice, and then Jamie, loudest, sharpest. Timpani, maybe? I know enough about classical music to appreciate it, but not enough to assign instruments to my friends heard at a distance. I don’t know what they’re talking about, but it’s probably the usual—Helen’s law practice, Sarah’s phi…