People You've Been Before

<p class=ql-align-justify> The big deal in this small town is the high school's 100th-anniversary</p><p class=ql-align-justify>celebration attracting politicos town-boosters the hoi polloi the</p><p class=ql-align-justify>wayward and the sinister too. Some come out of curiosity. Some for</p><p class=ql-align-justify>love. Others to stir trouble. And one to settle old scores.</p><p><br></p><p>All teem about the local baseball hero state champion and one-time</p><p>teacher/coach Finn Pyykonen in his effort to right the grievous wrong</p><p>visited on a junior baseball catcher unjustly imprisoned for a heinous crime a</p><p>quarter-century before.</p><p><br></p><p>Advent of Elizabeth tells the story of righteousness of love's longing </p><p>of mischief--the malicious kind--and of the many winding ways in the</p><p>human heart.</p><p><br></p><p>Satire angst ego and surprise draw the reader through the three-day</p><p>reunion-fete and lives touched by secret. In this burg it turns out</p><p>everyone has something to confess.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p>*</p><p><em>People You've Been Before</em> is a fierce and shattering portrait of a couple's 40-year relationship from marriage through divorce and its aftermath.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Wonderfully written and full of profound observations about life the purpose of fiction and the power of redemption <em>People You've Been Before</em> is a beautiful and haunting novel.</p><p>*</p><p><strong>When a novelist tells the story of an author writing another man's tale whose story is it?</strong></p><p>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?</p><p>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.</p><p><strong><em>People You've Been Before</em></strong> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>What in addiction-recovery circles is named <em>denial</em> is called <em>politic</em> in public office and either <em>saving face </em>or <em>betrayal</em> in marriage depending on who's talking. In the world of the writer <em>lies</em> make <em>fiction</em> but if the writer doesn't know the truth fiction becomes a lie.</p><p><strong>Who has the real story?</strong></p><p>*</p><p><br></p><p> </p><p> </p>