SOURCE: See, Carolyn. “A Lesson in Dying.” Washington Post (23 September 1994): F1.

In the following review, See calls Quindlen's One True Thing “a hypnotically interesting novel, straight and plain, and very lovable.”

People may get lost in the gruesome topicality of what happens in One True Thing. Don't many of us have parents who are looking peaked, acting as if they might die? And isn't their demand, “When I get too sick to take care of myself, I want you to be the one to give me the pills, the seductive combination of vodka, morphine, Nembutal etc., because there's no one else I can trust to do it”? My own mother has always been insistent on this point, and I answer sourly that she'd be having her cake and eating it too: She'd be mercifully released, and I'd get to spend the rest of my life in the slammer...