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Polly Goodman is around age 40 and navigating infertility. She has a good marriage to a solid, loving man and a supportive group of friends in a small book club. She’s an English teacher at a private school and enjoys what she does. She has a wonderful relationship with her father, whose dementia is progressing, and a complicated one with her prickly mother, a judge.
Life gets a bit more interesting when the three friends in her book club give her a DNA ancestry test as a gift, which is mostly a gag. When she sends off her DNA, though, she gets a strange result: she’s a very close match with someone she’s never heard of. And she has no idea how.
In reading the synopsis of More Than Enough, it sounded like the book would focus a lot on the unexpected ancestry test result. But that is just one thread that runs through the story. Polly is in a stage of life where she’s facing a parent losing his memory, she’s still trying to become a parent herself and despairing of it ever happening, and a dear friend has cancer. A lot is going on here, and I felt the book is really just a portrait of a woman at a certain stage of life dealing with circumstances that are common to that stage. It’s about family and friends. It’s about how you expect life will go a certain way and it inevitably doesn’t.
Life is messy. Family often is part of that messiness, and it often is part of what helps you through the messiness. Friends who have your back are another vital piece of the support system through it all. But loss and heartache come through those connections as well.
Anna Quindlen is a master at writing about these themes, about digging into what is the core of life. I haven’t read many of her books, but those I have read have been excellent. I read More Than Enough because it is one of the early picks from Katie Couric for her new book club, and Couric is making solid recommendations. I was absorbed, engaged in and moved by this story and glad I got to pick it up.
Rated: Mild. Profanity includes 15 instances of moderate profanity, about 30 uses of mild language, and 25 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content includes some talk about sex, brief references to anatomy, kissing, and references to an affair. The talk about sex is brief, and generally refers to a couple trying to get pregnant and dealing with infertility and medical intervention.
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