Three Junes (2002) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Paul McLeod: newspaper publisher and recent widower
• David: The younger veterinarian brother of Fenno and twin of Dennis.
• Tony: Fenno's lover, Fern's lover, photographer and schmoozer
• Fenno: Paul's eldest son, an introspective gay man
• Dennis: Add a description of this character.
• Maureen
• Stavros: Father of Fern's child, son of Fern's landlord
• Lucinda
• Veronique
• Fern Olitsky: the artist who once captivated his father
• Malachy Burns: Very good friend & neighbor to Fenno
• Ralph
• Jack
• Jonah
• Laurie
• Richard
• Marjorie Guernsey-jones
• Anna
• Davey
• Rodgie: Fenno's dog
• Armand
• Heather
• Thea
• Lillian
• Colin Swift
• Christine
• Betsey
• Mrs. Ramage
• Denis
• Aaron
• Gillian
• Jonathan

Quotes edit see section history

• “Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note. That first day back I recall in fuguelike detail, with perfect pitch, but as for the next few months, the autumn and early winter before my mother's death, I remember only snatches of a superficial tune.”

  Fenno

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• “All I meant was that people take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that. And some places have a way of magnifying your demons, or of, I don’t know, giving them pep pills.

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• “I hate it when people talk about twists of fate,” Anna liked to say. “When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.”

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• Splinters in the heart, invisibly and erratically painful: this is how Fern has thought of her accumulating sorrows. Impossible to expel or withdraw; if you’re lucky, they slip out on their own. But perhaps they are more like the seeds inside a brightly patterned gourd, beyond germination but essential to the wholeness of the gourd itself. Without breaking its durable, ossified skin, you cannot remove them; sometimes they will clatter about and make themselves known. It’s just the nature of things.

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• “This garden, you know, it reminds me of my life before the girls. Oh, a lovely life, a life of pretty colors and passions. And this little wood of cerisiers I could say is like my marriage to Denis. But to have children . . . to have children is to plant roses, muguets, lavender, lilac, gardenia, stock, peonies, tuberose, hyacinth . . . it is to achieve a whole sense, a grand sense one did not priorly know. It is to give one’s garden another dimension. Perfume of life itself.”

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• Like her, he is an agonizer. Like her, he feels the atmosphere about him too acutely: the stealthiest shifts in wind direction, ozone level, barometric pressure. Sometimes it’s almost too much to bear.

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• Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year’s pining, one long unfolding note.

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• When it comes to love, there is the timeworn caution that the very qualities you fall for hardest may be those you grow to despise.

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• The trouble is, if you convince yourself the past’s more glorious or worthy of attention than the future, your imagination’s sunk.”

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• Which of the places, objects, and recreations surrounding me now had shaped which parts of my grown—or outwardly grown—self? Had they anything to do with my innate loneliness, my strange satisfaction at thinking myself so misunderstood, my reluctance to recognize love where I ought to have seized it?

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• Paul sighs. “I’m not much of a collector.” More truthfully, he might have said that he had come here not to take memories away but to leave them behind, to bring some of the ones he already has and drop them like stones, one by one, in the sea.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• New York
• Greece
• Paris
• Scotland
• France
• London
• Tealing
• Mars
• Vermont
• Athens
• Cambridge
• America
• Connecticut
• Flora
• Washington
• Europe
• Edinburgh

Organizations edit see section history

• American Kennel Club: Add a description of this organization.

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Julia Glass (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• National Book Award (2002: Fiction)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PS3607.L37 T48 2002
• Dewey: 813.6

Notes for Parents edit see section history

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Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Mystery & Thrillers › Thrillers › Psychological & Suspense
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary