People You've Been Before - Tim Jollymore

 The big deal in this small town is the high school's 100th-anniversary

celebration, attracting politicos, town-boosters, the hoi polloi, the

wayward, and the sinister, too. Some come out of curiosity. Some for

love. Others to stir trouble. And one to settle old scores.

All teem about the local baseball hero, state champion, and one-time

teacher/coach, Finn Pyykonen, in his effort to right the grievous wrong

visited on a junior baseball catcher, unjustly imprisoned for a heinous crime a

quarter-century before.

Advent of Elizabeth tells the story of righteousness, of love's longing,

of mischief--the malicious kind--and of the many winding ways in the

human heart.

Satire, angst, ego, and surprise draw the reader through the three-day

reunion-fete and lives touched by secret. In this burg, it turns out,

everyone has something to confess."

A story full of insight into the social feelings, antisocial behaviors, and internal torments of the alcoholic life. Told with humor, irony, and depth of feeling." Not to be overlooked.

*

People You've Been Before is a fierce and shattering portrait of a couple's 40-year relationship from marriage through divorce and its aftermath.

Tim Jollymore's ambitious book is a day in a life-or better a life in one day-of novelist Els Mattila who has just completed a new work of fiction. Yet his visiting ex-wife charges that he's simply written a memoir that painfully exposes the addiction, abuse, and betrayals of their relationship.

Their galvanizing encounter starts in Els' Manhattan apartment as the couple grapples with their complex and tragic history: a journey from Minnesota to Oakland and Hollywood, California, into a recovery program, and on to New York City. Yet at every turn, the reader must decide who is telling the truth.

Wonderfully written and full of profound observations about life, the purpose of fiction, and the power of redemption, People You've Been Before is a beautiful and haunting novel.

*

When a novelist tells the story of an author writing another man's tale, whose story is it?

Meet Els Mattila, an aging novelist who just spent three hundred days staring out the back window of his Manhattan, West Village apartment-writing. What came of those days?

According to Els his finished manuscript is a work of fiction, but his visiting ex-wife calls it a memoir. Even Els admits-but only to the reader-that he wrote it "from memory."

People You've Been Before is the story of a couple's day-long encounter colored by forty years of marriage, divorce, and tragedy-exploring questions of who we are today and who we were all the days before.

The visit begins a morning in New York City and takes the couple, by late afternoon, through Minnesota, Northern California, and on to Hollywood as Els recounts his hell-and-back journey into-and out of-a recovery program that saved one of two lives.

What in addiction-recovery circles is named denial is called politic in public office, and either saving face or betrayal in marriage, depending on who's talking. In the world of the writer, lies make fiction, but if the writer doesn't know the truth, fiction becomes a lie.

Who has the real story?

*