A Book Review: Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler is a book that follows a series of events leading up to a wedding. The story is told from the perspective of the bride’s mother, Gail Baines.
Gail Baines is a socially awkward elderly woman who, at the start of the book, was losing her job because her manager thought she did not have “people skills.” This was an utter surprise to Gail, who thought she was surely in line for a better position, but she let the news fester inwardly while she dealt with her daughter Debbie’s wedding.
Throughout the book you get to hear Gail’s inner dialogue unfiltered: how she felt about her ex-husband showing up to her house, how she experienced her daughter’s wedding as someone who is not quite fit to lead social gatherings. Going through these days with Gail, I, as a reader, felt like it was such a treat to be inside her mind!
I love love love when the protagonist is an unfiltered grumpy woman! I find their recollections and assessments of events to be a breath of fresh air, and so straight to the point. You see Gail experience growth throughout the book, from first absolutely rejecting her manager’s assessment of her to slowly starting to see how she could improve herself. You also see her process her feelings in real time about her daughter getting married and what it means to her, and there were a couple of hiccups leading up to the wedding which forced Gail to reflect on her past and the decisions she made. In her reflections there is so much raw honesty that I loved reading.
There were rumblings that Debbie’s fiancé had cheated on her before the wedding. That was never confirmed or denied throughout the book, but Gail herself felt very strongly that there was cause to stop the wedding. She objected to the fiancé’s behavior and saw how it impacted her daughter, but the crazy twist was that Gail’s marriage had ended because she herself had been disloyal in the past. She committed infidelity at its fullest, and that twist in her daughter’s life forced her to face herself in the way she had been running from.
One of the hardest things for us as people is to reflect on our mistakes and take full accountability for them. Sometimes within our internal dialogues, or mine at least, I find myself putting blame on circumstances, on previous experiences leading up to the mistake, on unmet needs, but when it comes down to it: I made a mistake, and that’s the bottom line. It is helpful sometimes to understand why we made the mistake, but it is often more helpful to accept the fact that we did, acknowledge it as such, and move forward from it.
Gail had been escaping her mistake and her thoughts about it, but the events in the book forced her to come face to face with it. She was able to break it down further, and as a result her relationships with the people in her life improved, and most importantly, her relationship with herself.
It was quite refreshing to see that that is the outcome of facing the hard truth. While it can get messy and muddy, and feelings can get tangled up to the point where you feel like you can’t breathe, in the end there is light at the end of the tunnel. The outcome will result in you becoming a lighter human being, floating through life instead of trudging mercilessly, carrying so much baggage.
Good people do bad things, and that’s okay sometimes.
Whilst the book was quite short in length, it was full of revelations and entertainment too. I actually found the book to be hilarious: Gail has the funniest and most peculiar way of describing things. I have become very fond of Anne Tyler’s style of writing. It’s so nice to see a full cycle complete and for things to end in such a satisfying way. If I could sum up this book in one word, it would be: refreshing.
It also always feels very rewarding to finish a book, and experiencing that quite quickly because of the book’s length was another cherry on top!
I highly recommend this book, and for what it is, I’d rate it 5/5!
