conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled Breathing Lessons about Maggie, Ira, Breathing with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: "Breathing Lessons" covers the events of a day in the life of Maggie Moran, nearing fifty, married to Ira and with two children. Her eternal optimism and her inexhaustible passion for sorting out other people's lives and willing them to fall in love is severely tested one hot summer day. Maggie and Ira drive from Baltimore to Deer Lick to attend the funeral of the husband of Serena, Maggie's childhood friend. During the course of the journey, with its several unexpected detours - into the lives of old friends and grown children - the author shows us all there is to know about a marriage: the expectations; the disappointments; the way children can create storms in a family; the way the wife and husband can fall in love all over again; the way that everything - and nothing - changes.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a plot for a book titled Breathing Lessons about Maggie, Ira, Breathing with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary.. End with the sentence '\nShe thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her point of view of them".'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Breathing Lessons: The story describes the joys and pains of the ordinary marriage of Ira and Maggie Moran as they travel from Baltimore to attend a funeral and back home again in one day.\nIt also examines Maggie\'s attempts to reconcile her son and daughter-in-law.\nDuring the journey to the funeral, we learn how both Ira and Maggie have forgone their youthful dreams and feel they have settled for an "ordinary life".\nWe experience how they exasperate each other—Maggie too talkative, too meddling; Ira too logical, uncommunicative, and too judgmental.\nA few detours during their 90-mile drive reveal Ira and Maggie\'s "incompatibilities, disappointments, unmet expectations—and lasting love".\nEdward Hoagland describes the novel: "Maggie, surprised by life, which did not live up to her honeymoon, has become an incorrigible prompter.\nAnd she has horned in to bring about the birth of her first grandchild by stopping a 17-year-old girl named Fiona at the door of an abortion clinic and steering her into marrying Maggie\'s son, Jesse, who is the father and, like Fiona, a dropout from high school.\nThe book\'s principal event is a 90-mile trip that Maggie and Ira make from Baltimore.\nto a country town in Pennsylvania where a high school classmate has suddenly scheduled an elaborate funeral for her husband.\nMaggie.\nindulges her habit of pouring her heart out to every listening stranger, which naturally infuriates Ira, who, uncommunicative to start with, has reached the point where Maggie can divine his moods only from the pop songs of the 1950\'s that he whistles.\nMaggie, although exasperating.\nis trying to make a difference, to connect or unite people, beat the drum for forgiveness and compromise.\nAs Ira explains, "It\'s Maggie\'s weakness.\nShe believes it\'s all right to alter people\'s lives.\nShe thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her point of view of them".
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first four paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Breathing Lessons
  We were strolling through Belvedere Square, for instance, on an early-spring afternoon when we met our old next-door neighbor, Jim Rust. "Well, what do you know," he said to me. "Aaron!" Then he noticed Dorothy beside me. She stood peering up at him with one hand shielding her forehead from the sun. His eyes widened and he turned to me again.
  Visibly, he pulled himself together. "Oh... great," he said. "I mean... or, rather... but of course we miss you. Neighborhood is not the same without you!"
  He was focusing on me alone—specifically, on my mouth, as if I were the one who was talking. He wouldn't look at Dorothy. He had pivoted a few inches so as to exclude her from his line of vision.
  I took pity on him. I said, "Well, tell everybody hello," and we walked on. Beside me, Dorothy gave one of her dry chuckles.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: My sister said Dorothy was too old for me, but that was just because I had foolishly told the truth when I was asked. Even though she was eight years my senior—forty-three when she died—she seemed younger, because of that good strong Hispanic skin. Plus, she had enough padding to fill out any lines. You wouldn't really think about age at all, with Dorothy.
  My sister also said she was too short for me, and it is undeniable that when Dorothy and I hugged, all the wrong parts of us met. I am six-feet-four. Dorothy was not quite five-one. If you saw us walking down the street together, my sister said, you would take us for a father and child heading off to grammar school.
  Maybe it was just a long, long way to travel, and that's why it took Dorothy all those months to come back.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Even though she was eight years my senior—forty-three when she died—she seemed younger, because of that good strong Hispanic skin. Plus, she had enough padding to fill out any lines. You wouldn't really think about age at all, with Dorothy.
  My sister also said she was too short for me, and it is undeniable that when Dorothy and I hugged, all the wrong parts of us met. I am six-feet-four. Dorothy was not quite five-one. If you saw us walking down the street together, my sister said, you would take us for a father and child heading off to grammar school.
  Maybe it was just a long, long way to travel, and that's why it took Dorothy all those months to come back.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I was a rough-and-ready kind of kid, despite my differences. I was clumsy but enthusiastic, eager to join whatever pickup game was happening on our block. Mom would literally wring her hands as she watched from the front window, but my father told her to let me do whatever I felt capable of. He wasn't as much of a worrier. But of course he was off at the office all day, and middle-aged by then besides. He was never the kind of father I could toss a football with on weekends, or ask to coach my Little League team.
  So I mostly spent my childhood fending off the two women in my life—my mother and my sister, both of them lying in wait to cosset me to death. Even that young, I sensed the danger. You get sucked in. You turn soft. They have you where they want you then.
  The first time she saw me, she said, "What's wrong with your arm?" She was wearing her white coat and she asked in a brusque, clinical tone. When I explained, she just said, "Huh," and went on to another subject.
  The first time she rode in my car, she didn't so much as glance over, not even at the very start, to check how I was driving. She was too busy huffing on her glasses and polishing them with her sleeve.
  She was unique among women, Dorothy. She was one of a kind. Lord, she left a hole behind. I felt as if I'd been erased, as if I'd been ripped in two.