Book Review: Pieces of Someday

By Jan Vallone, Gemelli Press LLC (January 4, 2010), 220 pages, available from amazon.com and bn.com, with proceeds going to Catholic Relief Services.

Pieces of Someday recounts the life experiences of Jan Vallone. Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Jan Vallone is the granddaughter of Sicilian immigrants. At the age of 44, she is everything her Italian American parents brought her up to be – a successful attorney, a wife and mother with the vintage home, and the European vacations. Yet none of this provides her with the happiness she desires. In fact, her unhappiness threatens her marriage and weakens her faith. Leaving behind her career, Jan accepts a teaching job in an orthodox Jewish high school, although she has been raised Catholic. It is there that she discovers the meaning of faith and fulfillment.

Jan describes her purpose in writing the memoir: “As a Catholic, I wanted the memoir to explore how loss and disappointment (suffering) shape the people we become. As I’d aged, I’d become aware that pain helps develop the best parts of ourselves—at least if we allow it to—and that we can use our hardship to make possible something good. As the memoir shows, for much of my life, I’d been miserable, wanting to please by serving—especially my father, bosses and husband—and never feeling success at it. Then I fell into teaching, which felt like a gift for my old age, my call from God, the first thing I ever did well. And I knew that if I’d accomplished anything good for my students, it was because I’d suffered the exact disappointments I had. So the memoir focuses on vocation, examining how a person comes to know what she’s on the earth to do, and considers what impedes and facilitates discerning a vocation, especially gender, ethnicity, religion, family, community, hardship and luck.”

The memoir focuses primarily on her “waffling years”, which precede a period of deeper conversion to her faith, not described in this book. What Jan does share with her readers are the ordinary, everyday experiences of her life in which God guides her in very subtle ways to do His will.

The story begins in May of 2008, with Jan sitting in Blessed Sacrament Church in Seattle, Washington, asking herself, “What am I doing here this morning, sitting in a church when it’s not Christmas?” From that point, we are taken back in time as Jan reminisces on vocation and the various events which led up to this point in her life. The story unfolds in an un-chronological manner, mimicking the way in which many of us come to understand God's plan--in bits and pieces that seem haphazard to us at first, but make perfect sense when we look back.

Jan Vallone is a wonderful storyteller. Written in a lyrical, humorous, and intimate style, Pieces of Someday is the touching tale of one woman’s struggles and blessings throughout the various stages of her life. I found her memoirs to be compelling and felt as if a friend were confiding in me, sharing the most important, intimate details of her life with me. She had my full attention.

While I found the narrative to be an interesting and well-written story, which I was able to relate to on an intellectual and emotional level, it did not move me spiritually nor did it come across as a deeply spiritual work, but is the story of someone who is just beginning to discover the meaning of faith in her life.

I believe that Jan’s memoirs would be appealing to women of all ages, but particularly to women who are middle-aged or older, as this is where the crux of her story takes place.

Overall, Pieces of Someday was an engaging, well-written, entertaining story which will appeal to women of all ages.

As a note of caution to the reader, there is harsh language contained in the book which may be offensive to some readers.

Also, in sharing past events, the author briefly mentions a method of dealing with infertility in her book which is not endorsed by the Catholic Church. It is important to note that at this time in her life the author was unaware that this method as described in the book was not endorsed by the Church.

~ © Jean M. Heimann, July, 2010

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