Different novels, same story

When I happened to read Any Place I Hang My Hat (2004) by Susan Isaacs and Big Stone Gap (2000) by Adriana Trigiani back-to-back, I noticed they tell essentially the same story: An independent woman, still young but with her clock ticking, decides to locate a parent she has never known, while at the same time realizing that the man she has discarded may actually be the love of her life.

Of course the details are quite different.

Isaacs tells us of Amy Lincoln, whose mother abandoned her when she was still a baby, leaving her to be raised by her paternal grandmother, a woman who mostly supported herself by shoplifting. Amy's father, though a caring parent, has been in and out of prison for most of his adult life. Nevertheless Amy managed an Ivy League education and now works for a prestigious magazine full of political news and commentary.

While covering a senator running for president she meets a young man who claims to be the senator's son from a youthful fling. Her magazine doesn't do scandal, but the young man's search for his father's acceptance inspires her to search for her mother.

Meanwhile her relationship with John, her longtime boyfriend, seems to be going nowhere. When she catches him at a concert with another woman, she decides to end it. But somehow it's not really the end.

While Amy lives in New York City, Ave Maria Mulligan lives the same story in Big Stone Gap, Va. She owns a drug store, rides in the community ambulance on emergency runs and directs the annual summer pageant in her community. She loves her life but, approaching 36, she wonders if this is all it will ever be. For her, it is the death of her mother that triggers a change.

Her mother was an Italian immigrant who ended up in a small town in the Virginia mountains married to a pharmacist. A letter to Ave given to her after her mother's death reveals that Ave's actual father was her mother's Italian lover, a married man. Her mother had left Italy in shame, and in America Fred Mulligan agreed to marry her. He, however, was never much of a husband — or a father. Can she find the father she never knew she had? She gives away her business and decides to go to Italy to find a new life, perhaps her true life.

But then there's Jack MacChesney, a shy coal miner who has had a crush on her since they were in school together. When he asks her to marry him, she scorns him. Yet Jack and, as it turns out, his mother don't give up so easily.

Both Isaacs and Trigiani tell their stories with humor and compassion. Even if they are essentially the same story, they are different enough and the writing good enough that reading both of them, even if back-to-back, is a pleasure.