Review: I Miss You When I Blink

I've been buried in a wonderfully relentless deluge of library books recently but was delighted to slow down for a couple of days with Mary Laura Philpott's I Miss You When I Blink late last week. I'm a big fan of memoirs but hadn't read one in a while. This collection of essays had such a nice pace and flow, reading the book actually gave me an air of peaceful calm -- almost like a grown-up bedtime story? -- which is certainly way out of the ordinary for me. Here's why.

Philpott's stories feel very all-American to me, nostalgic, articulate, and thoughtful. She explores her perceptions of her mother, her rebellious determination to date an all-wrong for her guy, deep dives into her own depression, laying bare her need to just.go.away in a way that feels like a conversation with a close friend over glasses of white wine on the front stoop in summer, maybe. She is intensely likable, quite funny, and utterly charming. I nodded throughout: I've been there. Yes. Yes!

Curiously, the title, which I love and kicks off the first essay in the book, struck me completely differently than it did for the author. I mean, it's her's so she's in charge, but I was surprised to have interpreted it so completely different and now kind of love that I did. The sentiment -- I Miss You When I Blink -- was hatched by Philpott's young son while ruminating on rhyming and is something I felt almost viscerally as a parent to a little boy: days are long, but the years so short; his round and soft baby hands already morphed into those of a child, a big kid. Time flies and is so wistful. Perhaps we'd talk about on the aforementioned front steps some evening.

The chapter about joining "the Ruby Committee" felt so aligned with my life right now that I texted one sentence after another to my mom-squad, and I called my mother over and over again to narrate so much of the book that I'm not sure she'll see the need to read it herself. "This Guy" was a lovely ode to her Hootie-loving-husband and it landed one of the most important pieces of advice on marriage there is to dispense: I found the best person early. I got lucky. Thank goodness she didn't marry the LSD guy.

In an age when we are relentlessly connected, but more rarely make true connections, I Miss You When I Blink felt like quality time with a great, old friend.