Mary Laura Philpott presents a memoir-in-essays about what happened after she checked off all the boxes on her successful life’s to-do list and realized she might need to reinvent the list—and herself.
These aren’t earth-shattering revelations, but Philpott shares them in a refreshingly straightforward way, like a new friend getting you up to speed on the major tent poles of her life. You have a sense that she’s building up to something big. That’s because she is ... Like her literary forebears, Philpott has an eye for detail ... But her real gift lies in making the connection between the small moments and the big ones, so you feel you’ve walked into a complicated, glittering web by the time you finish I Miss You When I Blink ... delicious ...
A mosaic of a life changing in subtle rather than radical ways ... In a book that jumps blithely from subject to subject, self-described type A personality Philpott, who’s subject to clinical depression when overwhelmed by life and specifically by the demands of parenthood, hits some of the high and low points of her autobiography and muses about their meanings ... Readers with their own sets of anxieties should be charmed by the author’s friendly tone, warm sense of humor, and relatable experiences.
I Miss You When I Blink will resonate especially with women who, like Philpott, came of age in the immediate aftermath of second-wave feminism — the first generation of women raised to believe they could, and should, 'have it all' ... In some respects, I Miss You When I Blink explores the same emotional territory as Wild and Eat, Pray, Love, but Philpott’s book is an essay collection, not a traditional linear memoir ... I Miss You When I Blink also happens to be very, very funny ... the book’s appeal crosses generations and genders thanks to Philpott’s gift for finding the absurdity in despair (and everything else under the sun, for that matter), her honesty and the universality of her experiences on the road to discovering that 'joy is bigger than fear.'
