Sleepwalking in Daylight
Praised for her “haunting” (Booklist) and “tremendously touching” (Kirkus Reviews) novels, Elizabeth Flock reveals the inner workings of a modern marriage with unflinching honesty in Sleepwalking in Daylight, delivering a provocative story that Publishers Weekly calls “redemptive…familiar and melancholy. ”Once defined by her career and independence, stay-at-home mom Samantha Friedman realizes her life has become a routine of errands, car pools and suburban gossip. She deals with a husband who shows up for dinner but is too preoccupied for conversation, an increasingly moody daughter who won’t talk at all, and wonders, Is this it? Since finding out she was adopted, seventeen-year-old Cammy Friedman has felt like an outsider.Unwilling to reach out to the parents she once adored, she shields herself behind black clothing and begins to drift into dangerous territory with questionable friends and risky behavior. Mother and daughter indulge in their own respective escapism— for Sam, clandestine coffee dates with a handsome stranger, fueled by the desire to feel something; for Cammy, a furtive search for her birth mother punctuated by sex, pills and the need to feel absolutely nothing—until a pivotal moment in an otherwise average day alters their relationships forever.“Heartfelt and poignant, unique and memorable… The story is rich and resonates long after the last page has been turned. ” —John Shors, bestselling author of Beneath a Marble Sky
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Selected praise for Sleepwalking in Daylight
“Flock draws astute parallels between the alienated Cammy and Sam—living in a sexless marriage, bored with driving to endless soccer practices and sick of being the devoted mom … Filled with perceptive, dead-on insights into both teenage angst and the common pitfalls of marriage in the middle years.”
—Booklist
“Elizabeth Flock offers us a haunting look at the challenges and responsibilities of raising a small family in suburban America. This is a cautionary tale about the perils of narcissism and living in denial.
Once you pick it up, you can’t not read it to the very last page. Sleepwalking in Daylight will be remembered for a very long time.” —New York Times bestselling author Dorothea Benton Frank
“Elizabeth Flock’s Sleepwalking in Daylight is a painfully emotional mother-daughter story told in the voices of Samantha and Cammy, in alternating chapters. Samantha is so wrapped up in herself that she can’t fathom Cammy’s unhappiness. Cammy secretly tries to find her birth mother, certain that her ‘real’ mother will understand her as Samantha does not. Flock tells a disturbing family story in two authentic voices.” —Boston Globe
“[A] terrific novel … [Samantha] is still married but she’s fallen in love with someone else—and is desperately trying to reconnect with her goth-obsessed teenage daughter.”
—Parenting magazine, “Recommended Read”
“Elizabeth Flock is a skilful storyteller, and the suspense is genuine as we watch Cammy sink deeper and deeper into her pain. Samantha is indeed ‘sleepwalking in daylight’ and the reader wants to scream at her to wake up.”
—AuthorMagazine
“Have you ever opened your eyes and realised that you’ve been sleepwalking through your life? If so, this is the novel for you. Sleepwalking in Daylight is heartfelt and poignant, unique and memorable. Elizabeth Flock’s characters feel real, her dialogue is first-rate. The story is rich and resonates long after the last page has been turned. This novel isn’t about the perfection of life, but rather, how life’s imperfections make it all the more precious.” —John Shors, bestselling author of Beneath a Marble Sky
Also by Elizabeth Flock
EVERYTHING MUST GO
ME & EMMA BUT INSIDE I’M SCREAMING
For Jill Brack
Acknowledgments
The writing of this novel took place during perhaps the most wrenching two years of my life and would not have been possible without the loving support of friends and family. To say they held me up and put me back together during a nearly unbearable time would be an understatement—they did so much more. For a multitude of reasons, both personal and professional, I will be forever grateful to Mary Jane Clark, Joan Drummond Olson, Bruce Fine, Mary Chase-Ziolek, Jodie Chase, Dotty Sonnemaker, Catherine DiBenedetto, Kat Mosteller and Kim Merenkov.
My heartfelt thanks to my editor, Susan Swinwood, and to my agent, Larry Kirshbaum, both of whom patiently and brilliantly guided and shaped this novel through its many incarnations. I am deeply grateful, too, to Margaret Marbury, to Kathleen Carter at Goldberg McDuffie, to John and Fauzia Burke and the team at FSB Associates.
There is nothing like the bond between siblings, who know you best and keep you anyway. I hope Peter, Katherine, Regi and Jill know how much I love them and appreciate them daily. My girls, Emily and Lizzie, fill me with pride and happiness. I love and adore them beyond measure. As I do their father, Jeffrey. That will never change. Ever.
My parents are without question the strongest, most generous and loving human beings I have ever encountered. Their arms and hearts are open to all their children and grandchildren, but I fear I may have tested this more than the rest. My one hope is that they know how deep and profound my love is for both of them. Their marriage has lasted more than four decades and is the gold standard for how to do it right. Because of them, I believe in love.
And in the end that is what this book is about: love. Plain and simple.
Samantha
We haven’t had sex in eleven months. Just shy of a year. More time than it takes to grow a human being. I know it was eleven months ago for two reasons: one, it was on our wedding anniversary and on wedding anniversaries sex is a given and two, the next night was the incident with the family room light. I was reading a book about a missionary family in Africa I ordered after Oprah plugged it. I keep track of what I read on my calendar and plus I remember wishing it weren’t our wedding anniversary because I was at the good part but instead I had to pretend I didn’t know Bob was simply going through the motions required of husbands celebrating their wedding anniversaries.
So there we were the following night, in the second floor room that is, after the kitchen, the nerve center of our house. Bob was at the computer in the corner searching eBay for tennis rackets even though it’d end up costing more for one on eBay when you factor in the shipping and handling.
