Gologorsky, Beverly

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Gologorsky, Beverly

PERSONAL: Partner of Charles Wiggins; children: Georgina.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Random House, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

CAREER: Activist and writer. Works in legal-medical publishing.

WRITINGS:

The Things We Do to Make It Home (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1999.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A novel.

SIDELIGHTS: In her first novel, The Things We Do to Make It Home, Beverly Gologorsky writes about the effects of the Vietnam War on a group of veterans and especially on their wives and families. Beginning with a 1973 party held in celebration of the veterans returning home, the story then propels the reader forward twenty years. Here, audiences can see how the veterans' experiences have negatively impacted their lives and the lives of those around them as they continue to deal with both the physical and mental aftermaths of the war. For example, two of the vets become homeless and two more are dying, one from Agent Orange-associated cancer and the other from Lou Gehrig's disease. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Jacqueline Carey noted that the novel's stories "revolve around two emotional poles: the demons besetting the men … and the reactions of the women." Carey added, "Some of the one-on-one dialogue is amazing—lean and supple, completely persuasive, full of nuanced turns, dead on about how people try to bind and repel each other at the same time." Writing in Booklist, GraceAnne A. DeCandido called The Things We Do to Make It Home "a novel brimming with burning emotion and hurts that do not heal." Referring to the book as a "vivid, unsentimental Vietnam novel," a Publishers Weekly contributor also called it a "perceptive, compassionate account." Beth E. Andersen concluded in the Library Journal that the novel is "powerful and almost unbearably sad."