Terms of Endearment Book

I had never seen the movie & before doing so I picked up this book by the writer of Lonesome Dove. That work cannot be too easily compared to this estrogen-drenched Fem-Power! novel which paints its heroine Aurora Greenway as a sassy matriarch deeply afraid of becoming a grandmother & too selfaware of her love life to stop & help all of her sisters in plight: mainly, her daughter and her maid, who suffer at the hands of stupid husbands. Aurora has all the suitors eating right out of her hand. The movie is something truly v. different from the book.

That said, I cannot help but LOVE both movie and book because they are PERFECT companion pieces. The book is odd, the dialogue provides the clout. The movie, written in what I will call one of the Best Screen Adaptations of All Time (by James L. Brooks), deviates completely from the themes in the McMurtry novel of gender roles and life & love after 50. The movie starts off somewhere, then completely gives us something else when it was least expected; almost as if the characters we relate to and fall in love with are perpetual "fish out of water." The deus ex machina is unbearable; though in the book there is ample preparation and foresight for it--the character of Aurora's daughter Emma is given only contours in the book, whereas the daughter-mother relationship is blatant and the juice at the core of the 1983 film.

The book has crisply-written, impeccable prose; a maudlin realism that contrast beautifully with sultry Aurora's signature snaps and retorts, & it has an eternal companion piece on celluloid that elevates it to a higher plane entirely.