All Fall Down by Jennifer Weiner
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This review contains SPOILERS!
Allison Weiss begins abusing pain pills because she has to take care of her kid, deal with her father who has Alzheimer’s (but not really, because he lives with her mother), take care of the house and write five blog posts a week.
This…this is what most of the women I know do every day, except those women actually have to leave the house to go to work and have to do more than 500 words. But fine, I’ll suspend my disbelief a bit and go with the idea that Allison is a special snowflake.
By the way, this isn’t Allison’s fault. Her newspaper reporter husband got a book advance and then made her leave Philadelphia to live in a McMansion! And then her blog was discovered and she was hired as a writer and made so much money! And she has to take her child to school!
My gripes:
I’d take pills too, if Ellie were my kid. Methinks the wrong Weiss had prescriptions.
I ROARED at the notion that Dave, the Philadelphia newspaper City Hall reporter, having conservative attitudes. I worked at a newspaper too, and I think it’s genetically impossible for a newspaper reporter in this area to be anything less than 100% DNC-4-lyfe.
Why AA and not NA?
For an author named Jennifer who wrote a main character named Allison, she did a lot of ragging on the popularity of the names Ashley and Brittanys. As a Kimberly, it’s my duty to tell you that the names Jennifer, Allison, and Kimberly were REALLY popular in NJ/PA in our time. We were the Ashleys/Brittanys of the 70s/80s.
I’m about the same age as Allison, but her mother who should be slightly younger than mine is written as so very old. Not just because of her … problem … but her hair, makeup, etc seems more of my grandmothers’ styles. I don’t know why she’d be some sort of Meghan Draper wife when she came of age much later than that.
And her mother managed to solve her lifelong problem in a few weeks, by the way, without rehab.
I wanted to read more about Allison in rehab. We went from the events surrounding Ellie’s birthday and flashed forward to Allison out and living her clean life again.
At the end of the book, how in the hell did they manage to have two separate households in Philadelphia with only Dave working and Allison having blown so much of her own money on pills?
Here on Goodreads, two stars means “it was ok.” And there were parts that were very, very good. I found her scenes with Dave heartwrenching, and her aching for how they used to be punched me in the gut. But the book was about 85% a leadup to rehab, and 10% what happened afterward. That 85% was very redundant.
Disclaimer: I grew up in Cherry Hill, NJ and still live in the area. I experienced a great amount of schadenfreude at Allison’s descent because I would have gone to high school with her hoity-toity, nose-job-at-16 self.
***
Max’s blood glucose level actually went up yesterday (wtf?) so in addition to increasing his insulin dosage (we are up to 6 units 2x a day) we are switching him and Ollie to a higher-protein grain-free dog food. He has another blood test Saturday. Sigh.
