A Year and Six Seconds: A Love Story

In this polished though repetitive second work, actress and author Gillies (Happens Every Day) returns to her husband's leaving her and their two small sons, only to find she's probably better off. Gillies%E2%80%94the former wife of an Oberlin College English professor who found a more sympathetic connection with another woman in the department (names have been changed), even though the married couple had two small sons and a newly renovated house in Oberlin, Ohio%E2%80%94exiles herself to New York City, moving back into the home of her parents on the Upper West Side. While they are gracious and loving to the kids, Gillies, 35, doesn't want to be thrust back into the roll of the adolescent; she's angry and conflicted about her traitorous husband; the china she requests him to send arrives smashed; she has to endure the ritual of divorce signing with her strangely blank ex-husband; and she recognizes that her parents have other plans for their retirement. ("Mum, did I ruin your life?"). How to spend comfortable time with her in-laws? Will she learn from her mistakes, falling for unsuitable guys who routinely dump her? Should her ex's new woman have access to the kids? Gillies dispenses advice with a smarmy suavity that appears to have coated the rawness wrought by this senseless marital rupture. (Aug.)