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    Good in a Crisis: A Memoir of Divorce, Dating, and Other Near-Death Experiences
    Unavailable
    Good in a Crisis: A Memoir of Divorce, Dating, and Other Near-Death Experiences
    Unavailable
    Good in a Crisis: A Memoir of Divorce, Dating, and Other Near-Death Experiences
    Ebook254 pages4 hours

    Good in a Crisis: A Memoir of Divorce, Dating, and Other Near-Death Experiences

    By Margaret Overton

    2/5

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    About this ebook

    'Hilarious ... This memoir of how grieving makes us behave like lunatics is wonderful on friendship and motherhood and brutally honest about the rest' Psychologies

    '[A] grimly hilarious journey ... brutally funny reading about midlife coming of age' Kirkus

    My story begins with a divorce.

    During the four years of physician Margaret Overton's acrimonious divorce, she dated widely and sometimes indiscriminately, determined to find her soulmate and live happily ever after. But then she discovered she had a brain aneurysm.

    She discovered it at a particularly awkward moment on a date with one of many Mr Wrongs. Overton, an anaesthetist, realised she had been so busy looking after the needs of others that she had forgotten to look after herself. So she set out on a course to take control of her future and finally become independent of men.

    Good in a Crisis is Overton's witty story of dealing with the most serious of life's problems: loss of life, loss of love and loss of innocence.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateFeb 7, 2012
    ISBN9781408824368
    Unavailable
    Good in a Crisis: A Memoir of Divorce, Dating, and Other Near-Death Experiences
    Author

    Margaret Overton

    Margaret Overton is an anaesthetist with an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine and Creative Nonfiction. She lives in Chicago, and Good in a Crisis is her first book.

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    Reviews for Good in a Crisis

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    • 1/5
      Surprisingly, this was not my cup of tea. I couldn't finish it, which is rare for me. Oh well, onto the next one!
    • 3/5
      Margaret Overton is an anesthesiologist but this is not the story of her career, it is a personal account of her midlife crisis. It begins with her divorce after twenty years of marriage and the challenges that follow. Though her marriage is no real loss, Margaret is hurt as her husband flaunts his much younger mistress, the latest in a long line of women, she discovers, and makes financial arrangements unnecessarily difficult. Margaret doesn't expect to be alone for long though and with her daughters on the verge of independence, she begins to search for a companion. In the middle of her first amorous encounter, she experiences a blinding headache which leads to the diagnosis of an aneurysm. While she is incredibly lucky to survive and the aneurysm is repaired, there are lingering, if subtle, psychological effects. Health regained and with a new appreciation for life, Overton throws herself back into the dating pool, but the waters are murky and Margaret quickly finds herself out of her depth.While she is honest about her propensity for making increasingly poor choices, her lack of self awareness is startling during this period. An intelligent woman, she is nevertheless almost willfully naive, unable to recognise the warning signs her dates reveal. Overton seems determined to reveal the ridiculousness amongst the 'horror', and there are truly moments of real pain. I was shocked be her reaction to one particular incident where her response is not at all what I would expect from an educated, mature woman. There is a conversation in the course of the book between Margaret and her dear friend and colleague Neil, which Margaret recounts regarding a theory about the arrested maturity of doctors which I think rings true in general and certainly in Overton's case. Margaret sense of self preservation is more like an adolescents rather than a middle age woman's, when it comes to dating.In amongst her adventures in dating online, Margaret faces several other crisis, the deaths of her close friends - Neil and Paul, her mother's rapid decline into dementia, her daughter's serious accident and the rebuilding of her career. The six years or so that Margaret's memoir recounts were undeniably tough, a series of crisis that Overton nevertheless overcame.Good in a Crisis is an entertaining memoir but for me it was not the light-hearted, laugh out loud story the blurb led me to expect. That Margaret is able to look back on this difficult period of her life and find the humour in it, is admirable. Good in a Crisis is painfully honest and self deprecating, rarely is Margaret depicted in a good light, but I can imagine it could be a comfort and lesson for other woman floundering after life altering circumstances in midlife.