Law school dropout and failed writer, Johan Manootdjian is brought low at age twenty-eight by daily reliance on alcohol and drugs. Saved from institutionalization by a skilled therapist, he enters the mainstream work world for the first time. In recovery, Johan learns to live life one day at a time and, in his saner moments, is quite grateful for being part of the workforce at Girls of America Now, where he serves as an editor in its publications department. True, his employment with a primarily female organization is often met with puzzlement. "You work where?" And true, he does not occupy a corner office or an office at all, but the pay is good as are the benefits. Is it not best for him to remember that as a young man he could chart no better career course than to embezzle funds from a family business and, as he approached age thirty, sit at the wheel of a Checker cab in late 1970s New York City?
A finish line has a persistent place in Johan's thoughts, his modest goal being to reach retirement age and devote his energies to fulfilling his lingering literary ambition. Lurleen Lullabella, his new boss, has a more grandiose plan, to make GoAN into a powerhouse publisher to rival the titans of the industry. Any staff member not committed to her vision can simply vamoose. Feeling more and more like the old guard out of step with Lulabella and her agenda of change and fueled by moral outrage as Lurleen steps on many toes in the organization, Johan finds himself reflexively resistant to her aggrandizing plan for the future.
Johan's marriage to Isabel, his second wife, was also to be a finish line. In Isabel, he had found the woman he hoped to grow old with. Despite underlying problems that surface and lead to separation and ultimately divorce, he seeks to keep that dream alive. Others may not understand, but his emotional wiring always leads him back to her, as evidenced by his frequent and often impassioned correspondence with his ex.
A novel that moves forward and backward in time, This Island, This Life presents a portrait of a deeply flawed but spiritually driven man, a self-described Manhattan provincial committed to emerging from alcoholic ruin and building a life worth living in the borough of his birth.