Books: Honestly, We Meant Well By Grant Ginder (2020)

 

“Family vacation always comes with baggage. The Wright family is in ruins. Sue Ellen Wright has what she thinks is a close-to-perfect life. A terrific career as a Classics professor, a loving husband, and a son who is just about to safely leave the nest. But then disaster strikes. She learns that her husband is cheating, and that her son has made a complete mess of his life. So, when the opportunity to take her family to a Greek island for a month presents itself, she jumps at the chance. This sunlit Aegean paradise, with its mountains and beaches is, after all, where she first fell in love with both a man and with an ancient culture. Perhaps Sue Ellen’s past will provide the key to her and her family’s salvation.”

More darkly humorous than laugh out loud funny, Honestly, We Meant Well takes a very liberal Berkeley based intellectual family whose lives are slowly unraveling. Wife Sue Ellen has been teaching for three decades and is “worried that undergraduate laziness was becoming more the norm than an anomaly.” Her husband Dean is celebrated author with fans who sort of stalk him and even sleep with him. And their son Will, on the cusp of graduating college and still unsure what he should do with his life –which includes being the son of a celebrated professor of classical studies and bestselling author.

There is a fine line with these characters –they are morbidly trashy in some respect and dumb in others. And Dean plays too much the victim card here, having various affairs with much younger women and who fails to understand his own son’s issues, including the fact he plagiarizes his college thesis. And though Sue Ellen is not that horrible, she is another in a long line of women who for reasons never fully explain, stays with a cheating husband.

The Greek descriptions are great –makes you want to go there; a nice bit of travelogue and history to counterpoint some lesser interesting things that happen in the book. I think it could’ve been a bit more humorous and less turgid (it took me longer than it should to get through it), but I liked it enough to get Grant Ginder’s other book, People We Hate at the Wedding.