The Parts We Left Out

Joanna Haskell left her Hudson Valley hometown in 1991 and built a life in Chicago that no one ever asked her to explain. She has a respected career as a labor arbitrator, a divorce she handled like everything else, quietly and well, and a stepson she adores. She weighs two sides of a story for a living.

Her older sister, Susan, stayed. She raised her daughter, retired from the courts, and spent the last six years caring for their father in the house on Delaney Street, the house both sisters grew up in.

When Tom Haskell dies, he leaves that house to both daughters in equal shares, along with a basement full of notebooks, dozens of them, kept over thirty-five years in a retired engineer’s careful block capitals. They record the weather, the oil bill, who called, who visited, and every remark he thought worth keeping.

Joanna wants to sell. Susan won’t say what she wants. And as the house empties box by box, the notebooks start to unsettle the stories each woman has told herself about the other for thirty years. Nothing in them is a scandal. That is what makes them so hard to read.

Over one spring, summer and fall, Susan claims a life of her own for the first time in decades. That means paid work, an apartment she chooses herself, and a summer job keeping score for the town’s collegiate baseball team. Joanna, who never planned to stay a day longer than necessary, faces a decision about the next chapter of her career and finds an unexpected late-life connection with the town’s dry, patient bookseller.

The Parts We Left Out is a warm, intelligent novel about sisters, family history, inheritance, and beginning again in the second half of life. It is for readers who know that the people closest to us are often the ones we’ve understood least.