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10,399 ratings
From the author of Happiness for Beginners comes the instant New York Times bestseller (May 2018), an unforgettable love story about finding joy even in the darkest of circumstances.
Margaret Jacobsen is just about to step into the bright future she’s worked for so hard and so long: a new dream job, a fiancé she adores, and the promise of a picture-perfect life just around the corner. Then, suddenly, on what should have been one of the happiest days of her life, everything she worked for is taken away in a brief, tumultuous moment.
In the hospital and forced to face the possibility that nothing will ever be the same again, Maggie must confront the unthinkable. First there is her fiancé, Chip, who wallows in self-pity while simultaneously expecting to be forgiven. Then, there's her sister Kit, who shows up after pulling a three-year vanishing act. Finally, there's Ian, her physical therapist, the one the nurses said was too tough for her. Ian, who won't let her give in to her pity, and who sees her like no one has seen her before. Sometimes the last thing you want is the one thing you need. Sometimes we all need someone to catch us when we fall. And sometimes love can find us in the least likely place we would ever expect.
How to Walk Away is Katherine Center at her very best—a masterpiece of a novel that is both hopeful and hilarious; truthful and wise; tender and brave.
Praise for How to Walk Away:
"A heartbreak of a novel that celebrates resilience and strength." —Jill Santopolo, bestselling author of The Light We Lost
"If you just read one book this year, read How to Walk Away." —Nina George, New York Times bestselling author of The Little Paris Bookshop
"Warm, witty, and wonderfully observed." —Emily Giffin, New York Times bestselling author of First Comes Love
"Sympathetic and refreshing!" —Elinor Lipman, bestselling author of The Family Man
"I can't think of a blurb good enough for this novel...poignant, funny, heartbreaking." —Jenny Lawson, bestselling author of Furiously Happy
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$26.95
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ISBN-10
1250047315
ISBN-13
978-1250047311
Print length
368 pages
Language
English
Publisher
St. Martin's Griffin
Publication date
July 08, 2019
Dimensions
5.35 x 0.95 x 8.25 inches
Item weight
1 pounds
It’s the trying that heals you. That’s all you have to do. Just try.
Highlighted by 2,039 Kindle readers
The greater our capacity for sorrow becomes, the greater our capacity for joy.
Highlighted by 1,694 Kindle readers
When you don’t know what to do for yourself, do something for somebody else.
Highlighted by 986 Kindle readers
ASIN :
B076B271QT
File size :
3879 KB
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Enhanced typesetting :
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Praise for How to Walk Away
An instant New York Times bestseller (May 2018)!
"This generous story about family secrets, love in sickness and in health, and the resilience of the human spirit has serious Nora Ephron vibes." --Taylor Jenkins Reid, bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six
"A marvelous example of acceptance and healing and a celebration of family." --USA Today
"Center explores the limits of hope and love...[she] transforms the story of a family tragedy into a heartfelt guide to living the fullest life possible." --Publisher's Weekly
"With its appealing characters and wisdom about grappling with life's challenges, Center's sixth novel has all the makings of a breakout hit." --Booklist (starred review)
"Inspiring and romantic... A touching and truthful novel that shows how people can find comfort in the most unexpected places." --Library Journal
"A story about survival that is heartbreakingly honest and wryly funny, perfect for fans of Jojo Moyes and Elizabeth Berg." --Kirkus
"A heartbreak of a novel that celebrates resilience and strength." --Jill Santopolo, bestselling author of The Light We Lost
"If you just read one book this year, read How to Walk Away." --Nina George, New York Times bestselling author of The Little Paris Bookshop
"Warm, witty, and wonderfully observed." --Emily Giffin, New York Times bestselling author of First Comes Love
"Sympathetic and refreshing!" --Elinor Lipman, bestselling author of The Family Man
"I can't think of a blurb good enough for this novel...poignant, funny, heartbreaking." --Jenny Lawson, bestselling author of Furiously Happy
Read more
One
THE BIGGEST IRONY about that night is that I was always scared to fly.
Always. Ever since I was old enough to think about it.
It seemed counterintuitive. Even a little arrogant. Why go up when gravity clearly wanted us to stay down?
Back in high school, my parents took my big sister, Kitty, and me to Hawaii one year. I dreaded the flight from the moment they told us until well after we were home again. The phrase “flying to Hawaii” translated in my head to “drowning in the ocean.” The week before the trip, I found myself planning out survival strategies. One night after lights out, I snuck to Kitty’s room and climbed into her bed.
I was a freshman, and she was a senior, which gave her a lot of authority.
“What’s the plan?” I demanded.
Her face was half buried in the pillow. “The plan for what?”
“For when the plane hits.”
She opened an eye. “Hits what?”
“The ocean. On the way to Hawaii.”
She held my gaze for a second. “That’s not going to happen.”
“I have a bad feeling,” I said.
“Now you’re jinxing us.”
“This is serious. We need a survival strategy.”
She reached out and patted my bangs. “There is no survival strategy.”
“There has to be.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Because if we don’t crash, we won’t need one. And if we do crash…” She paused so I could catch her drift.
“We won’t need one?”
A nod. “We’ll just be dead.” Then she snapped her fingers.
“You make it sound easy.”
“Dying is easy. It’s not dying that’s hard.”
“Guess you have a point there.”
She closed her eyes. “That’s why I’m the brains of the family.”
“I thought I was the brains,” I said, nudging her.
She rolled away. “You know you’re the beauty.”
Impossibly, we survived that trip.
Just as impossibly, I survived many more trips after that, never hitting anything worse than turbulence. I’d read the statistics about how flying was the safest of all the modes of transportation—from cars to trains to gondolas. I’d even once interned at an office right next to an international airport and watched planes go up and come down all day long with nary a problem. I should have been long over it.
But I never could lose the feeling that “flying” and “crashing” were kind of the same thing.
Now, years later, I was dating—seriously dating—a guy who was just days away from getting his pilot’s license. Dating him so seriously, in fact, that on this particular Saturday, as we headed out to celebrate my not-yet-but-almost-official new dream job, I could not shake the feeling that he was also just about to ask me to marry him. Like, any second.
Which is why I was wearing a strapless black sundress.
If I’d thought about it, I might have paused to wonder how my boyfriend, the impossibly fit and charming Charles Philip Dunbar, could be one hundred percent perfect for me in every possible way—and also be such an air travel enthusiast. He never thought twice about flying at all—or doing anything scary, for that matter, like scuba diving or bungee jumping. He had an inherent faith in the order of the universe and the principles of physics and the right of mankind to bend those principles to its will.
Me, I’d always suspected that chaos was stronger than order. When it was Man against Nature, my money was on Nature every time.
“You just never paid attention in science class,” Chip always said, like I was simply under-informed.
True enough. But that didn’t make me wrong.
Chip believed that his learning to fly was going to cure my fears. He believed that he’d become so awesome and inspiring that I’d have no choice but to relax and enjoy it.
On this, we had agreed to disagree.
“I will never, ever fly with you,” I’d announced before his first lesson.
“You think that now, but one day you’ll beg me to take you up.”
I shook my head, like, Nope. “Not really a beggar.”
“Not yet.”
Now, he was almost certified. He’d done both his solo and his solo cross-country. He’d completed more than twice his required hours of flight training, just to be thorough. All that remained? His Check Ride, where a seasoned pilot would go up with him and put him in “stressful situations.”
“Don’t tell me what they are,” I’d said.
But he told me anyway.
“Like, they deliberately stall the plane, and you have to cope,” he went on, very pleased at the notion of his impressive self-coping. “Or you do a short-field landing, where you don’t have enough space. And of course: night flying.”
The Check Ride was next week. He’d be fine. Chip was the kind of guy who got calmer when things were going haywire. He’d make a perfect pilot. And I’d be perfectly happy for him to fly all he wanted. By himself.
But first, we were getting engaged—or so I hoped. Possibly tonight. On Valentine’s.
I can’t tell you how I knew, exactly. I’d just sensed it all day, somehow, the way you can sense it’s going to rain. By the time I buckled in beside him in his Jeep, I was certain.
I’d known Chip a long time. We’d been dating for three years. I knew every expression in his repertoire and every angle of his body. I knew when he was faking a laugh, or when he was bullshitting. I could tell in seconds if he liked a person or not. And I certainly knew when he was hiding something—especially something he was excited about. Even though this date seemed exactly like every other date we’d ever had, I just knew something big was about to happen.
I figured he’d take us to the Italian place with the twinkle lights where we’d had our first date. But, instead of heading for downtown, he turned toward the freeway and ramped up.
The top was off his Jeep. I clamped my arms down over my hair. “Where are we going?” I called.
He called back, “It’s a surprise!”
My stomach dropped at that. Once again, I knew Chip’s intentions without his even hinting. This was kind of a problem with us. I could read him too well. He wasn’t taking me to dinner. He was taking me to the airport.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, we had left the city of Austin far behind. He pulled up the parking brake beside an airplane hangar at a private airfield in the middle of nowhere.
I looked around. “You can’t be serious.”
He leaned in. “Are you surprised?”
“Yes and no.”
“Just pretend. Just once, I’d like to surprise you.”
“Fine. I’m shocked. I’m awed.”
“Don’t pretend that much.”
He came around to my side and took me by the hand, and then he pulled me behind him, bent over all sneaky, around to the far side of the hangar.
I followed him in a state of cognitive dissonance—knowing exactly what he was doing while insisting just as clearly that he couldn’t possibly be doing it. “Are you sneaking me in here?” I whispered.
“It’s fine. My friend Dylan did it with his girlfriend last week.”
I tugged back against his hand. “Chip. I can’t!”
“Sure you can.”
“Is this—illegal?”
“I just want to show you my plane.”
“It’s not your plane, buddy.”
“Close enough.”
I had zero interest in seeing his plane. Less than zero. I was interested in wine and appetizers and candlelight. I almost had the job of my dreams! I wanted to be celebrating. I was in the mood to feel good, not bad. “Can’t we just go to dinner?”
He peered around, then turned back to me. “Anybody can go to dinner.”
“I’m cool with being anybody.”
“I’m not.”
Then, with a coast-is-clear shrug, he pulled me out across the pavement and stopped in front of a little white Cessna. It looked like the kind of plane you’d see in a cartoon—wings up high, body below, and a spinny little propeller nose. Very patriotic, too. Red, white, and blue stripes.
“Cute,” I said with a nod, like, Great. We’re done.
But he took my shoulders and pointed me toward the cockpit.
I took a step back. “What are you doing?”
“Let’s go for a ride.”
“I’m afraid to fly. Remember?”
“Time to get over that.”
“I’ll throw up. I’ll be motion-sick.”
“Not with me, you won’t be.”
“It’s not about you. It’s about flying.”
“You just need the right pilot.”
I was shaking my head—half disbelief, half refusal. “You’re not even certified.”
“I’m as good as certified. I’ve done everything there is.”
“Except take the test.”
“But the test is just to see what you’ve already learned.”
“Chip? No.”
“Margaret? Yes. And right now before they catch us.”
The force of his insistence was almost physical, like a strong wind you have to brace against. He wanted to do this. He wanted me to do this—to show faith in him, to believe in him. It wasn’t a test, exactly, but it was still something I could fail.
I wasn’t a person who failed things.
I was a person who aced things.
It felt like a big moment. It felt draped in metaphorical significance about bravery, and trust, and adventurousness—like it would reveal something essential about who I was and how I’d live the rest of my whole life. Saying no to flying right now suddenly felt like saying no to every possibility forever. Did I want to be a person who let minuscule statistical risks undermine any sense of bravery? Was this a challenge I couldn’t rise to? Was I going to let fear make me small?
I’m not sure I ever really had a choice. Chip was Chip. He was my perfect man, and I’d thought so ever since his parents moved in next door to my parents, back when we were both in college. Our mothers became best next-door-neighbor friends, drinking wine on the patio and gossiping, but I only saw him on vacations. In the summers, his dad made him mow the lawn, and I ’d stand at our window and watch. One time, my mom urged me to take him out a bottle of water, and he glugged the whole thing down in one swoop. I still remember it in slow-mo.
But I really didn’t know him at all until we both wound up at business school together back home in Austin by accident. I was team leader of our study group, and he worked under me, which was good for him.
That’s how we fell in love.
I’d have married him that first night we kissed, if he’d asked me. He was that kind of guy. Tall, clean-shaven, blond, all-American, high-achieving, confident. And dreamy. People did what he wanted. I felt lucky to be with him, and I’d doodled “Margaret Dunbar” more times than I’ll ever admit. I once Googled dog breeds for our future pet. And one night, when shopping for something else—I swear—on the Home Depot website, I clicked on a little pop-up box for wood fence pickets. Just to see how much they were.
Now we were both out of school with our brand-new MBAs, both about to start our new jobs—Chip as an entry-level financial analyst at an investment bank, a job he found through a friend of his dad, and me as a business development manager for an oil and gas company called Simtex Petroleum. His job was good, but mine was far better, and I thought it was sporting of him, and rather gallant, to be so happy for me.
In truth, I wasn’t even qualified for my new job. It required “five years of experience in the sector,” “advanced knowledge of bidding for commercial contracts,” and actual “international experience,” none of which I had—but my B-school mentor had gone out on a limb for me, calling in a favor from a friend and writing a stunning letter of recommendation that called me a “fiercely energetic forward thinker, a problem solver, an excellent communicator, and a team player with strong business and financial acumen.”
I’d laughed when he’d showed me the job listing. “I’m not remotely qualified for this.”