I admit she made me both cringe and snicker many times. Aurora wants the best for her daughter, but she has a ruthless way of showing it. He had to have spent untold days of his life observing the relationships between mothers, daughters, lovers and friends.

If I didn’t already know McMurtry could write women so convincingly, I’d have asked how on earth he managed to pen these two with such authenticity. I can’t get enough of this kind of stuff. She is not very nice to any of them – most of the time! The dynamics between mother and daughter intrigued me the most on a personal level. Aurora has one daughter, Emma, and a string of suitors. Not too often does the gooey goodness inside leak out, but when it does, you are confident that it’s always just there, beneath the surface. Larry McMurty gave us brief glimpses of a woman that has a hard outer core but a soft middle. How do I feel about her? Well, I’m not so sure I’d want her for my mother or my employer or my lover, but damn was I fascinated by her! She grew on me, despite all my attempts to keep her at arm’s length. Whether you adore her, detest her, or feel a strange mixture of love and hate, there is no way you will ever forget her. “She had never been inclined to pass over accessible hearts, if the person carrying them seemed somewhat palatable.”Īurora Greenway, nearing her fiftieth year, is irrefutably one of the most memorable characters you will ever come across in literature. I very well may be the only person left on the planet that hasn’t yet seen the film adaptation either, so I went into this without any preconceived notions based on that (although I do know who played the main roles, but they never popped in my head while reading.) One thing, however, that I will say if you don’t already know the gist of the story: Do Not read the blurb on Goodreads or on the back of the book! It has every single thing that I search for in a perfect reading experience: engaging dialogue, sharp characterizations, humor, passion, and realistic life situations.

If I didn’t have hundreds (okay, thousands) of books on my to-read list, I could easily have started this one right over again just minutes after finishing it. Men, some of them decent and good, seemed to march through her life almost daily, and yet they caused so little to stir within her that she had begun to be afraid – not just that nothing would ever stir again, but that she would stop wanting it to, cease caring whether it did or not, or even come to prefer that it didn’t.”

“She had made every effort to remain active, to keep open to life, and yet life was beginning to resist her in unexpected ways.

Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry