Finished: Terms of Endearment (McMurtry). Terms of Endearment the book is soooo different from Terms of Endearment the movie, one of my top three favorite movies of all time! I was really disappointed that the book didn't follow the movie more, even though the movie came after the book, lol. Out of 410 pages of book, McMurtry didn't even get to writing about the daughter, Emma Horton, until there were only 47 pages left in the book! Sure, she was in the other 363 pages here and there, but that part of the book was primarily about Aurora Greenway, Emma's mother, and her many, many suitors, and how she treated them. It was also more about Aurora's housekeeper, Rosie and her husband and their ups and downs even more than it was about Emma and her husband, Flap. :-(

And...what's more...Emma and Flap are never even in love in the book. They've already been married for two years when it starts and he treats her so detestably. Of course, I wasn't happy with his behavior in the movie either. He was a weak, weak man. Anyway...the incredible relationship between Aurora and Emma was just not the same in the book as it was brought to the screen by Debra Winger and Shirley McClain in the movie. I was brought to tears in the final 47 pages, though, when they jumped ahead to Emma being a mom of Tommy, Teddy and Melanie and finding out she has cancer. Her goodbyes to her children were heartbreaking. The book didn't have the scene (Shirley's Oscar winning scene) where Aurora screams at the nurses to bring her daughter her medicine because she only had to wait that certain time and it had gone over the time. Nope...not in the book. Also, when Emma finally dies, Flap and Aurora are both there in the movie and it shows Flap having fallen asleep in a chair, but Aurora is awake and looking at her daughter. Emma gives her a weak little wave. The look the mother and daughter exchange makes me cry just thinking about it. Then, Aurora looks away briefly and looks back and Emma is gone. Sigh.

So, in the introduction, Larry McMurtry said that Emma Horton is one of his truest, favorite characters and it took him a long, long time to get over killing her off. Apparently she's in two of his other books!! I'm going to seek those books out. Larry McMurtry is definitely a wonderful writer and I actually came to know Aurora Greenway in even greater detail. The book is just so different from the movie. Oh, oh...another HUGE difference...there is no astronaut next door!!!! No Jack Nicholson, in other words. Nope...the character that Garrett Breedlove is based on from the book is an ex-General named Hector...and he's far crankier and far more unbending. He doesn't really become a rock for Aurora at the end like Garrett finally does in the end of the movie. Oh well...I'm still so glad I read the book! It's my last book of the year 2012. :-)

Just a couple of passages. I can't let this one go without a couple of passages.

When Emma is looking out the window, watching her boys, Tommy and Teddy, she is regretfully thinking about how the failure of her and Flap's relationship has affected the boys:

   Tommy, tense himself, could live with tension. He could climb up on his bunk bed and read, answering no questions and responding to no demands; but not Teddy. Teddy needed arms around him, ears to listen; he needed everyone in the house to be warmly, constantly in love with one another. Emma knew it; her youngest son's yearning for a household filled with love haunted her, as her marriage died. Tommy wanted no illusions; Teddy wanted them all, and his mother was his only hope.

And, I finally see where the title of the book came from in this next passage that also just breaks my heart. Emma wakes up in the hospital to hear her mother and her best friend, Patsy, talking about who should take the children to raise them, both ignoring their father, Flap, who is also in the room:

    Then one day she awoke and Patsy was there, fighting with her mother. They were fighting about Melanie. Patsy had offered to take her, to raise her with her two girls, but Aurora bitterly opposed it. Flap was there too. Emma heard him say, "But they're my kids." Patsy and Aurora completely ignored him. He was not relevant.
    Watching them, Emma's head really cleared, for a while. "Stop it!" she said. They stopped with difficulty, two extremely angry women. To her puzzlement, she smiled; they didn't realize she was smiling at them.
    "They're my blood," Aurora said. "They're certainly not going to be raised in California."
    "That's very biased," Patsy said. "I'm the right age, and I like raising children."
    "They're OUR children," Flap said, and was again ignored.
    Emma realized that that was what she had been forgetting in her grogginess: the children. "I want to talk to Flap," she said. "You two take a walk."
    When they were gone she looked at her husband. Since her illness he had almost become her friend again, but there was still an essential silence between them. 
    "Listen," Emma said. "I tire easily. Just tell me this: Do you really want to raise them?"
    Flap sighed. "I've never thought I was the sort of man who'd give up his kids," he said.
    "We're thinking of them," she said. "We're not thinking of how we'd like to think of ourselves. Don't be romantic. I don't think you want that much work. Patsy and Momma can afford help, and you can't. It makes a difference. 
    "I'm not romantic," Flap said.
    "Well, I don't want them living with Janice," Emma said.
    "She's not so bad, Emma, " Flap said.
    "I know that," Emma said. "I still don't want her exercising her neurosis on our children."
    "I don't think she'd marry me anyway," Flap said.
    They looked at one another, trying to know what to do. Flap's cheeks had thinned, but he still had something of his old look, part arrogant, part self-deprecating---though the arrogance had worn thin after sixteen years. Somehow that look had won her, though she couldn't remember, looking at him, what the terms of endearment had been, or how they had been lost for so long. He was a thoughtful but no longer an energetic man, and he had never been really hopeful. 

Sigh...good book...incredible movie.