A Different Kind of Vow
Rewriting My Happily Ever After
A Different Kind of Vow is a compelling memoir about midlife self-discovery.
Laurie Collister’s heartening memoir A Different Kind of Vow is about finding happiness in an unexpected way.
Collister once dreamed of marrying and having children. To achieve that goal, she spent decades dating men who didn’t fulfill her emotional needs. She also postponed activities that piqued her interest because she didn’t have a partner to do them with. In her late forties, she set out to find a different purpose and fulfill her personal needs.
Much page space is devoted to Collister’s dating misadventures, recounting how the men she dated prove unsuitable in different ways. Their flaws often showed early on, though. One called himself a “senator of the spiritual realm” and prompted considerations of a restraining order; at another point, Collister’s yoga teacher moved into her house and broke her rules. The men are fleshed out in terms of their idiosyncrasies, and not beyond; they blur together and bog down the book’s progression, which is too often consumed with capturing the tediousness and frustration of Collister’s romantic life. In addition, the book is off-putting at times, as when Collister compares leaving a job to a former friend leaving Yugoslavia and emigrating alone to the United States, or when thinking of the partner who told her he liked to cross-dress as two different people, depending on what he was wearing.
When the book shifts its focus to Collister’s career, its scenes are more compelling. In the same way, her considerations of spiritual fulfillment are consuming, used to flesh out her priorities and values before she became aware of them herself. Her lack of romantic success is attributed, in subtle ways, to her unsuccessful attempts to fit in by making decisions that felt unnatural but necessary to her, like purchasing a condo and becoming president of a homeowner’s association. In time, she instead found her true purpose in an unforeseen venue:
I’d found my spot in the world, someplace I was meant to be. Now, I gazed at the hummingbirds as they dipped their beaks in a feeder of sugar water and ravens as they wove back and forth across the turquoise sky.
This leads into an ending that is lighter and more hopeful than the material that preceded it, which was marked by suffocating emotional heaviness.
An encouraging memoir about midlife self-awakening, A Different Kind of Vow covers the pursuit of love and happiness in new places.
Reviewed by
Carolina Ciucci
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
