While growing up
in New York City, I befriended Isabel Gillies—a funny, cool, quirky girl in my age group. Her model good looks landed her on the cover of Seventeen when she was 15. In her twenties she was a strong, independent woman who dated famous actors and starred in the Whit Stillman cult film Metropolitan before landing a recurring role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
In her thirties, Gillies married a great-looking man who was getting his PhD in poetry at Harvard. They had two beautiful sons and moved to Ohio, where he got a teaching job at Oberlin College. Soon afterward, her husband left her for another woman. I immediately thought, How could this happen to her?
Well, it did happen to her, and she recounts the expe- rience in her new and courageously dignified memoir, Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story (Scribner). The oft-told tale sees Gillies taking the high road through an amicable separation that many New York divorces could do well to emulate. “In trying to be polite friends, you kind of trick yourself into actually feeling that way,” she explains. “I had to be strong for my boys.”
Heeding the words of her father—”I’d rather light a candle than curse the darkness,” a reference to the comment originally made by Adlai Stevenson as he eulogized Eleanor Roosevelt—Gillies forged ahead. “[I was] glad to be home and feeding off the exquisite energy that New York oozes from every crack in the sidewalk,” she says. A few years later, she married a man “more suited to my personality.”
She began writing the story on her BlackBerry in between errands. Every morning after dropping her kids off at school she’d head to the New York Society Library to continue her diurnal outpouring, a process that ended three months later in an unexpected cathartic moment. “It seemed like some- thing I was doing as a ‘job,’ and then on the last day I wrote the last sentence, put the period on the end of it, and went into the stairwell and sobbed my heart out,” she says. “My whole life my mother always said, ‘Don’t talk about yourself. Don’t talk about yourself.’ And suddenly I throw up this memoir. So I was terrified.” Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story will be available this month at bookstores citywide.
