Reviewing a memoir is never easy because it feels like passing judgment on how someone else lived their life.
Simone Gorrindo’s memoir is the story of her life as an Army wife, and in a sense the lives of Army wives more generally speaking. I’m not a military wife and I never will be so I read her memoir as someone interested in humanity and how the current and ongoing events affect humanity on a broad scale and on an insulated one.
The Wives gives the insulated story of life for a particular group of military families as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began to draw down. And this story is important because that’s when the general public stopped paying quite so much attention to events, unless something happened that could trigger a movement. Whether the public would have stopped paying attention if the age of 24-hour media hadn’t moved on to the next proverbial shiny toy is a question for another day.
The question for today, for society today, is if we’re willing to face the true cost of war. If we’re willing to support not just the men and women fighting in the wars, but support their families as well… just as we would any small community upended by, say, a wildfire.
The Wives is Simone and Andrew’s story at its outset and at its core. Through them, and their willingness to share their story, a reader can experience everything good and everything terrible (‘the best and the worst’ is a phrase Simone and Andrew use a lot) and see the ways in which the wide military community – not just the soldiers, sailors, and airmen – have to be a community onto themselves and that sometimes it’s just as heroic to get through another day as it is to get through a firefight.
I received an advance copy of The Wives through BookishFirst and the publisher in exchange for a honest and original review. All thoughts are my own.
Simone Gorrindo’s memoir is the story of her life as an Army wife, and in a sense the lives of Army wives more generally speaking. I’m not a military wife and I never will be so I read her memoir as someone interested in humanity and how the current and ongoing events affect humanity on a broad scale and on an insulated one.
The Wives gives the insulated story of life for a particular group of military families as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began to draw down. And this story is important because that’s when the general public stopped paying quite so much attention to events, unless something happened that could trigger a movement. Whether the public would have stopped paying attention if the age of 24-hour media hadn’t moved on to the next proverbial shiny toy is a question for another day.
The question for today, for society today, is if we’re willing to face the true cost of war. If we’re willing to support not just the men and women fighting in the wars, but support their families as well… just as we would any small community upended by, say, a wildfire.
The Wives is Simone and Andrew’s story at its outset and at its core. Through them, and their willingness to share their story, a reader can experience everything good and everything terrible (‘the best and the worst’ is a phrase Simone and Andrew use a lot) and see the ways in which the wide military community – not just the soldiers, sailors, and airmen – have to be a community onto themselves and that sometimes it’s just as heroic to get through another day as it is to get through a firefight.
I received an advance copy of The Wives through BookishFirst and the publisher in exchange for a honest and original review. All thoughts are my own.