Pictures of You

by Caroline Leavitt Narrated by Robin Miles

Overview

A tragic accident: One woman is left dead after she and another woman, both running away from their marriages, collide in the fog on a highway. The survivor, Isabelle, is left to pick up the pieces, not only of her own life but of the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman, April, has left behind.

Together, they try to solve the mystery of where April was running to, and why. As these three lives intersect, they are left to ask, How well do we really know those we love¿and how do we forgive the unforgivable?

Editorial Reviews

Carolyn See

This is a novel that invites us to look at our own imperfections, not the dramatic crimes, but the niggling little sins of omission that so often render our lives tragically undernourished and small.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Leavitt's ninth book (after Girls in Trouble), a touching story of loss and discovery, centers on photographer Isabelle Stein, whose stifled Cape Cod life and marriage crumbles when she discovers her husband has gotten his mistress pregnant. She packs up her cameras and takes off, but has a horrific car accident in Hartford, Conn., that kills the woman in the other car. As it turns out, the dead woman is April Nash, who lived a few blocks away from Isabelle's home on the Cape, and April's son, Sam, now believes Isabelle is an angel who can help him communicate with his mother. Once Isabelle ends up back on the Cape, she, Sam, and April's widower, Charlie, develop a strong but strange bond as they all try to sort out what comes next. Leavitt explores the depths of grief and the sticky spots sorrow pushes people into, and though the story stumbles sometimes into too saccharine moments, Leavitt's near bottomless reserve of compassion for her imperfect characters will endear them to readers. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

"Caroline Leavitt plumbs the depths of grief and forgiveness in the lovely Pictures of You." —Vanity Fair

"Suspenseful...gripping. Leavitt is superb. Most impressive is how Leavitt deals head-on with well-meaning people who come to realize, too late, that even an imperfect life is irreplaceable."—O, the Oprah Magazine (Jane Ciabattari)

"Emotionally wise and ambitious." —Elle Magazine

“Part literary mystery, part domestic drama, and part psychological examination.” —The Boston Globe

"White-knuckle ride of love and longing.  Reminiscent of  Alice Munro. Even the wildest coincidences in this brooding, beautiful novel sparkle with haphazard brilliance of broken glass." —Minnesota Star Tribune

"Hauntingly compelling." —San Francisco Chronicle Editor's Choice, Lit Pick

"This thoughtful novel brings up a problem all of us have to deal with in the course of our lives, unless we're lucky enough to sneak through existence without encountering misfortune of any kind . . . This is a novel that invites us to look at our own imperfections, not the dramatic crimes, but the niggling little sins of omission that so often render our lives tragically undernourished and small." —Washington Post


"Leavitt is superb at revealing the secrecy inside many marriages and the way children grieve . . . most impressive is how Leavitt deals head-on with well-meaning people who come to realize, too late, that even an imperfect life is irreplaceable." —O: The Oprah Magazine


"Leavitt's ambitious narrative examines the various kinds of love—uxorious, romantic, paternal—that can arise from or be transformed by unspeakable grief. These survivors bravely gather the fragments of their lives, which once seemed so safely wrapped up in habits and, it turns out, illusions. Their trials and triumphs remind us that however firmly we seek to root our perceptions in reality, some truths will always elude us in love." --Elle


"Although we all hope this becomes a seamlessly happy ending, its more like the sloppy, messy, human, frustrating, yet transcendent thing we generally call life." —Mothering Magazine


"Caroline Leavitt plumbs the depths of grief and forgiveness in the lovely Pictures of You." --Vanity Fair

Sound Commentary

Robin Miles does her usual lilting reading which is filled with quiet emotion. . . . She carries [the characters] from the accident, through growing relationships and into the future.”
—Sound Commentary

Minneapolis Star Tribune

A white-knuckle ride of lost love and longing. . . . Never disappoints for a second.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

Huffington Post

Leavitt’s formidable skill is evident from beginning to end as we piece these lives together to find out what brought them to this world-ending moment. It’s like a somberly beautiful mystery that unfolds like a dark flower until we see the glowing heart. The characters are fully drawn and we immediately feel we know them, perhaps better than the people we spend our everyday lives with. It’s an age-old story of great love and great loss that is told in these pages, but deftly woven and in a way that makes it almost impossible to stop until you reach the end. Leavitt tells a haunted yet revelatory tale and resists the urge to end it neatly—instead it has the unmistakable agony and glory of real people living real lives.”
—Huffington Post

San Francisco Chronicle

Leavitt’s literary touch is so light . . . that only when the mystery is finally solved does the reader realize how taut she’s kept the tension all along. The author’s sure steady hand at the wheel makes the reading experience so engaging, its characters so irresistible, that Pictures of You is a novel I suspect I’ll return to again and again.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

Boston Globe

Caroline Leavitt’s compelling new Pictures of You unfolds as part literary mystery, part domestic drama, and part psychological examination. Leavitt beautifully paces the intertwining stories, meticulously unfurling bits of the back story, letting us put together the pieces just as the main characters do.”
—Boston Globe

BookPage

Leavitt’s emotional and rich storytelling, set against the windy backdrop of Cape Cod, takes readers to a place they’ll long to visit again and again.”
—BookPage

Vanity Fair

"Caroline Leavitt plumbs the depths of grief and forgiveness in the lovely Pictures of You." --Vanity Fair

Mothering Magazine

"Although we all hope this becomes a seamlessly happy ending, its more like the sloppy, messy, human, frustrating, yet transcendent thing we generally call life." —Mothering Magazine

Elle

"Leavitt's ambitious narrative examines the various kinds of love—uxorious, romantic, paternal—that can arise from or be transformed by unspeakable grief. These survivors bravely gather the fragments of their lives, which once seemed so safely wrapped up in habits and, it turns out, illusions. Their trials and triumphs remind us that however firmly we seek to root our perceptions in reality, some truths will always elude us in love." --Elle

Washington Post

"This thoughtful novel brings up a problem all of us have to deal with in the course of our lives, unless we're lucky enough to sneak through existence without encountering misfortune of any kind . . . This is a novel that invites us to look at our own imperfections, not the dramatic crimes, but the niggling little sins of omission that so often render our lives tragically undernourished and small." —Washington Post

Kirkus Reviews

"Tragedy leads to complicated love as a widower and the woman who accidentally killed his wife are united by a grieving child looking for an angel. Compassion and a delicate narrative voice lift Leavitt's.. (Girls in Trouble, 2003, etc.) heartstring-tugger, set in Cape Cod, that's shaped by loss and yearning...Crossed wires are eventually straightened out, but not predictably. Heartfelt (everyone cries), deft and highly readable fiction."

Booklist

"In Leavitt's (Girls in Trouble, 2005) compelling new novel, a car crash provides the catalyst for an examination of how well we know the people we love. Leavitt thoughtfully handles friendship and romance in scenes of emotional resonance. She understands the ache of loss, the elusiveness of forgiveness, and the triteness of words like"closure."An expert storyteller, Leavitt alternates perspective among her three leading characters, providing insight into the thoughts, secrets, and dreams that they withhold from each other. Whether these individuals will arrive at happiness separately or together is the question that drives the narrative, and the reader, forward as Leavitt teases suspense out of the greatest mystery of all—the workings of the human heart." --(Patty Wetli)

Venus Zine

"With a tragic story and a cast of highly relatable, flawed characters, Pictures of You is a kind of female version of another novel that revolves around a car accident, John Burnham Schwartz's haunting Reservation Road.”

Hot Type Vanity Fair

Caroline Leavitt plumbs the depths of grief and forgiveness in the lovely Pictures Of You.

the Oprah Magazine O

"Suspenseful...gripping. Leavitt is superb at revealing the secrecy inside many marriages and the way children grieve; several moving scenes involve Sam, who has come to imagine Isabelle as a crash scene "angel" who will take him to his mother. Most impressive is how Leavitt deals head-on with well-meaning people who come to realize, too late, that even an imperfect life is irreplaceable." --(Jane Ciabattari)

Library Journal

In Leavitt's (www.carolineleavitt.com) ninth novel, following Girls in Trouble (2005), April and Isabelle are two women running away from their respective former lives when they collide in a car accident that results in April's death. The accident's three survivors—Isabelle and April's devastated widower and son—struggle to recover their physical and mental health, to win forgiveness and understanding, and to resume a normal life. Audie Award nominee Robin Miles (Brother, I'm Dying) skillfully renders the multiple voices and accents. Though the plot is a bit predictable and the development of the characters a bit sketchy, making the motivation behind their actions somewhat unconvincing, the title's appeal is greatly enhanced by Miles's narration, recommending this audio for listeners of general fiction. [The Algonquin pb original was recommended "for fans of women's fiction," LJ 9/1/10.—Ed.]—Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence

MARCH 2011 - AudioFile

Leavitt’s latest novel explores tragedy and the reverberations it has on the lives of those it touches. Narrator Robin Miles provides an even-keeled delivery. Her approach works well, at first, as the novel depicts the initial tragic events: an accident that kills a mother, sends her son into shock, and leaves another woman wracked by guilt and unable to drive. The story develops more complexity as parallels are discovered between the women and lives converge in the aftermath, bringing healing and growth as new relationships are formed. Ultimately, Miles may not be the best match for the novel as the listener may be left wishing that her narration matched the emotional depth of Leavitt’s characters. J.L.K. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171648398
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	01/25/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Pictures of You

A NOVEL

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By Caroline Leavitt

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Copyright © 2010 Caroline Leavitt
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56512-631-2

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Chapter One

There's a hornet in the car. Isabelle hears a buzz and then feels a brush of wing against her cheek. A grape-size electric motor sings past her right ear. What's it doing out in this weather? she wonders. It rumbles past her again, and she practically jumps. She tries to wave it outside, but instead it kamikazes to the back of the car, navigating among her cameras. Which is worse, she thinks, waiting for the sting, or the sting itself? She opens all the windows wider.

September fog is rolling across the highway, westbound US-6. Isabelle's windshield clouds. At first, she doesn't panic. She's been driving for twenty years already. She's a good, careful driver, and right now all this cloudiness is just an unwanted surprise. A trick of weather.

She switches on the headlights before she sees how much worse the lights make everything, how they reflect the fog. She tries the parking lights instead, which are a little better. They cut a small visual path on the road for her. Already, she feels a headache the size of a hard, shiny dime, forming behind her eyes.

Isabelle strains to see the road, checks her gas gauge, which shows half empty. She slows down. She wants to keep driving but might have to get off at an exit in Connecticut to fill up her tank.

Isabelle rubs at the window. She can still see. In the backseat, she's got money she took from the bank to help get her resettled until she can find work. All her cameras are here, and one small suitcase stuffed with clothes. Let Luke toss the rest. Let him give them to Goodwill or his new girlfriend.

Or his new baby.

She knows this is crazy, but right now she's capable of anything. She could reinvent herself. She could blot out her past.

A green sign, LEAVING CAPE COD, flashes by, and she starts to breathe. People sit in traffic for hours just to get here. They come from Boston and New York to spend two weeks in a tiny cottage and bread their bodies with beach sand and tanning lotion and absorb more sun than is healthy. Tourists collect the beach glass like it was diamonds instead of chipped pieces of soft drink bottles, and though everyone always tells her how lucky she is to live here, she's never wanted anything more than to leave. Every time a visiting friend gets ready to leave, she's had to stop herself from begging them to take her with them.

This isn't the first time she's run away, but the first time was a lifetime ago, back when she was sixteen and God knows that doesn't count. Now she has a little money, a profession, and a dirt-cheap illegal sublet in New York City that's available for as long as she wants it, courtesy of her friend Michelle. She yearns for cities where people don't make you feel there is something wrong with you because you live there year 'round.

She tugs at her thin necklace, lapis on a gold chain that was a gift from Luke for her last birthday, and in a flare of despair she yanks it off in one brief rip. She throws it out the window and lets the fog swallow it up. She tugs off the wedding ring he gave her, too, a broad gold band wide enough to have her name scratched on the inside, and bounces it onto the highway. She checks her rearview mirror, wondering if Luke will come after her.

She squints at the sky. Maybe the fog will lift. There're still rays of sun out there, shooting through breaks in the clouds. God startling people into paying him some attention. That's what her mother used to say. A sign.

Isabelle glances up at the sky again. If you want to talk about signs, talk about how the sky had looked just this way the first time Isabelle had brought Luke home. She was just fifteen and he was twenty-five and working at the local gas station, a job that didn't exactly go over big with her mother. Of course, Luke's age made it even worse. She was so in love it was like being insane. She couldn't breathe when she was near him, couldn't eat or sleep, and her brain felt rewired.

Luke was the one who cleaned her mother's windshield without leaving a single smear, who put gas in the car and checked the tires and the shocks. She knew his name because it was embroidered in red on his pocket. He had a green bandana that he wore like a headband in his long, glossy hair, and he always rolled up his sleeves, so Isabelle could see his muscles. When he smiled at Isabelle, his eyes were full of light. He looked at her like she was the most interesting thing he had ever seen.

When her mother was paying inside, he told Isabelle that he wanted to go live on the Cape, right by the ocean, and he almost had enough money to do it. He had asked Isabelle for her phone number and suggested they go to a movie.

"Not on your life," her mother said, coming up behind him. "She's way too young for you and way too smart and she's going to college to be somebody."

Keeping her eyes fixed on the road, Isabelle opens the glove compartment and takes out the Saint Christopher medal her mother gave her, needing its reassurance. Impulsively, she loops it around her neck. Nora, her mother, would be stunned to know that Isabelle had kept it, that, in fact, this necklace is something she truly treasures. Everything had seemed like a wide open road back then, and of course that was before she knew that everything she had ever hoped for was impossible. "Safe travels," her mother had told her, fastening the chain about Isabelle's neck, even though Christopher's sainthood was stripped a long time ago, even though Isabelle no longer believes in saints.

Isabelle and Luke came home one evening, when Nora was supposed to be at work at the library. They had been seeing each other a year then. It was a summer evening, and Isabelle wanted to pick up money so they could go to dinner. But as they pulled up, her heart sank, because there was Nora's little red sedan in the driveway. "Cheeze it, the cops," she said, trying to stay light, and then, as they got closer, she saw all these bright bolts of color scattered across the front lawn. "What the fuck?" Luke said. He started to laugh. "Is this her way of spring cleaning?" he said, but Isabelle gripped his arm.

"They're my clothes." Her voice was a rasp. There was her favorite blue dress, her winter coat, and all her junk jewelry sparkling among the dandelions. Her shoes were thrown on the bushes, her straw hat on the walk, her Saint Christopher medal gleaming on the lip of the lawn. The yard was a Jackson Pollock of clothes. Then the door banged open, and there was Nora, tall and beautiful back then, in the sleek green suit she had worn to work at her job in the library, her hair caught in a pin. Her arms were full of clothes and she stared hard at Isabelle and Luke, then opened her arms so the clothes tumbled out onto the front steps.

Isabelle leaped from the car. "Mom!" she cried.

"You don't follow my rules, you don't live under my roof," Nora shouted, slamming the door shut so fiercely that Isabelle began to cry. "Mom!" she wailed.

She made her way to the front door, grabbing up the Saint Christopher medal, picking up her sweaters, her skirts, bunching them in her arms. Her heart was racing so fast she was dizzy. She banged on the front door, rang the bell, but there was no response.

She dug out her key and then she saw the new, shiny lock. "Mom!" she cried, slamming her hands against the door. "Mom!"

She was banging on the door when she felt Luke touching her. "Shhh," he said. He led her away, and when she bent down to get her clothes, he said, roughly, "Leave them. We'll get you new ones. Better ones." He guided her back to the car and then there was nowhere else for Isabelle to go even if she had wanted to, except with Luke.

All she had with her were her cameras. "Drive slow," she told him. She said it was because the cops around here were such hardasses, but it was really because she wanted to give Nora a chance. She kept expecting her to run from the house, to call Isabelle, Isabelle, to stop Isabelle before she did something that couldn't be undone.

Isabelle and Luke drove to the Cape, landing in a tiny town named Oakrose, a place right outside Yarmouth, that all the signs said was famous for its sunny beaches and fried oysters. The beaches, though, were small and crowded, and Isabelle didn't like oysters. Almost immediately Luke got a job at a local bar/café called Josie's. Isabelle got a job taking pictures at You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby, a cut-rate child photography place where no one cared if the shots were artistic or you had a degree, as long as you were fast and could focus a camera. No one had come looking for Isabelle. Her mother had never called. Then the owner of Josie's died, and Luke took all the money he had saved and got a loan to buy it, renaming it Luke's. In that moment Isabelle somehow knew her mother would never come for her and Luke would never leave.

She wore the Saint Christopher medal all through her new high school, forging her mother's name on the paperwork, getting her records transferred, not really making friends because who else at sixteen lived with their boyfriend and not their parents. Who else worked every shift she could at the Leaning Tower of Pizza in order to save some money for film instead of going out and having fun? She wore it through the times she'd called home and gotten no answer, gripping it for comfort and hope. She'd worn it while she worked at the photo studio, loving the feel of it against her skin, the slide and flash, as she adjusted a child's hair or repositioned her light meter. She swore the medal made her customers behave better because they thought she was a believer, when really, she had no idea what she believed in.

And now here she is, thirty-six and married, and no longer a child, with no child of her own. There was never enough money for her to get the college degree she thought she'd have. Though she works at her photography, she's never sold a photo or had a show. The necklace brings her bright, glimmery hope, and ridiculous as it is, it comforts her to feel it around her neck. It still makes her feel that things can change.

She rolls up the windows and turns on the air conditioner. The car clicks and knocks. Luke had spent the last few years trying to get her to buy a better car, a little compact in a bright color instead of this black box that was always breaking down.

"How can you love something that never runs right?" Luke always said. And her joke response was always, "Well, I love you, don't I?"

Three hours later and she's still driving. She knows she has to stop for gas, so she gets off i-95 South and heads deeper into Connecticut. The weather is muggy and strange, as if it doesn't know what it wants, can't decide if it's going to rain or turn sunny.

She's in a white summery dress, but still, sweat beads on her back. With one hand, she tries to gather up her hair, so long she's practically sitting on it. Sometimes at the photo studio, the kids stare at her and ask her if she's a witch with all that black hair, if she can do magic. "A good witch," she says, smiling, but today, she's not so sure. The wire-rimmed glasses she needs to drive slide heavily on her nose; when she takes them off, there's a red mark on the bridge, like someone's underlined her for emphasis. "You're too sensitive for your own good," Luke had always told her.

And well, she is, isn't she? She feels the cold more than Luke does, bundling in sweaters as soon as the fall chill hits. The heat makes her wilt. She feels hurts more, too. The way, even after all this time, the cards she sends her mother always come back in the mail, scribbled across them in her mother's hand: addressee unknown. The way Luke sometimes looks at her when she surprises him at his bar. Though he says he is happy to see her, his blue eyes go cloudy, like an approaching storm.

People comment on her sensitivity at work, too. Sometimes people say that she actually sees things that aren't quite there yet. She'll capture a serious, thoughtful look in a usually sunny child. Or make a delicate little girl look steely. Some people say that Isabelle captures the very spirit of a child, that it's downright unearthly how you could look at one of Isabelle's images and somehow see a child's future. Years later, parents come back to the studio just to tell Isabelle how the serious and lawyerly looking baby she had photographed now wanted to be an actuary. How the delicately posed baby had signed with the Joffrey Ballet. How did you know? parents would ask. How could you know?

"I don't know," Isabelle would reply. Or sometimes, because it would make the customers happier, she'd lie and say, "Ah, I just know."

But she didn't know. She didn't know anything. She didn't even know what was happening in her own life. Within the past year she had found a white filmy scarf in the laundry basket, a silver bracelet in the kitchen, and once, a tampon in the wastebasket when she wasn't having her period. All of them Luke insisted belonged to friends of his from the bar who'd dropped by. "Don't you think if I was hiding someone, I'd make sure to hide her things, too?" he asked. He acted like she was nuts.

She came to his bar some nights and saw him surrounded by beautiful women, laughing, letting their arms drape about his shoulder, but as soon as he saw Isabelle, he shook them off like raindrops and kissed her. But still something felt off, like he wasn't really there with her.

Three nights ago, a call woke her from a deep sleep, and when she grabbed for the receiver, reaching across Luke, she swore she heard a woman quietly crying. "Hello?" she whispered and the line went dead. And when she looked beside her, she saw to her shock that Luke's eyes were open and wet. "Baby, what is it?" she asked, alarmed. She pulled herself up, staring at him.

"Just a dream," he said. "Go back to sleep." And he had rolled toward her, one arm on her hip, and in minutes he was asleep, but she lay awake, staring at the ceiling.

Then this very morning, when Luke was at the bar, a woman called her, blurting her name. "Isabelle." And then the woman told Isabelle she was Luke's girlfriend, how she had been his girlfriend for five years. "I know all about you, Isabelle," the woman on the phone said. "Don't you think it's time you knew about me?"

Isabelle braced one hand along the kitchen counter.

"I'm pregnant and I thought you should know," the woman said.

Isabelle's legs buckled. "Someone's at the door," she managed to whisper and then she hung up the phone, ignoring it when it rang again.

Pregnant! She and Luke had wanted kids desperately. She had tried to get pregnant for a decade before all the tests and herbs and treatments ground her down. Luke brushed away talk of adoption. "Is it the worst thing in the world if you and I don't have kids?" he said. Isabelle thought it was, but she didn't know what to do about it. She made Luke help her turn the spare room that was supposed to be a nursery into a darkroom, and the only children who lived there were those whose faces she photographed.

At first, when she found out about Luke's pregnant girlfriend, she thought it was the end of the world. And then she told herself it was only the end of one particular world. She surely deserved better than what she had. She would shed this life like a cocoon.

Now her back aches and she stretches against the seat. Last month, she had gone for a massage, and the masseuse, a young woman with a yellow ponytail, had tapped along her body. "You carry stress here," she said, thunking Isabelle's shoulder blades. "Here's anger." The sides of her hands wedged against Isabelle's neck. "Here's sorrow," she said, touching Isabelle's spine, and Isabelle gripped the edge of the massage table, wincing.

Here's sorrow.

Smile and you'll feel like smiling, her mother used to tell her. God rewards happiness. At You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby, people always commented on her smile, bright, glowing, drawing kids to her like iron to a magnet. But she can't smile now no matter how hard she tries.

Isabelle glances at her watch. It's midafternoon and she's getting hungry. Her cell phone rings, but she doesn't pick it up, half afraid it's Luke's girlfriend again. I don't even know her name, Isabelle thinks. By now Luke is home and has found her letter. Maybe he's upset, maybe he's grabbing his jacket and his keys and he's gone off looking for her, desperate to find her. Maybe he's furious, smashing dishes on the kitchen floor the way he did when she first told him she wasn't happy living there, that she felt the Cape was suffocating her. In all the years they've been together, he's never hurt her, never raised a hand or even his voice, but he's smashed five sets of dishes, broken several glasses and a figurine he had bought her as a joke, a Scottish terrier with a tiny gold chain.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt Copyright © 2010 by Caroline Leavitt. Excerpted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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