The Cost of Smiling

What if the person who smiled the brightest was the one disappearing?Vito Marino has perfected the art of being fine.To his colleagues, he is the steady one-the one who delivers, who never cracks, who stays late and asks for nothing. To his family, the dutiful son who shows up and smiles on cue. To the few friends still in his orbit, just tired, just busy, just going through a rough patch.Everyone sees exactly what Vito shows them. No one sees the cost.He is surrounded by people who love him. He is told so, plainly, by those who mean it. And still he cannot make the words land-cannot get them past the thing in him that turns every kindness away before it reaches him. He can see his own life clearly: the good job, the family table, the man who loves him. He simply cannot make himself believe he is the one living it.The Cost of Smiling follows one unraveling year in the life of a man performing wholeness for everyone he loves, while the distance grows between the self he shows and the self he can no longer feel. It is a novel about the exhausting work of seeming fine. About love that arrives and cannot be received. About how far a person can drift while everyone around them sees only the surface holding.Told with sensory precision and unflinching tenderness-the bitter espresso of an early meeting, the silence after an unanswered question, the particular way light falls when you are watching the world from behind glass-it is a story of a life lived in all its complicated fullness, and of everyone left holding the smile when the smiling stops.For readers of literary and psychological fiction who believe a novel can sit with the hardest things and still be, somehow, a kind of company.