Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

“To have a reason to get up in the morning, it is necessary to possess a guiding principle.” 

That line—the first words of Judith Guest’s Ordinary People—was published 50 years ago. You read that right: A book that feels as if it were published last week has now unlocked a host of exclusive offers from A.A.R.P. But it is a credit to Guest that her debut novel still feels timeless—and became the source material for a movie beloved by many Americans, including our current pontiff.

I had Ordinary People on the brain this past week because I have many nieces and nephews starting high school and college these days, and their big transitions reminded me of the “Summer Reading List” I received before my own freshman year of high school just a few years (😬) ago. Thinking back on it, some of the choices were predictable for an all-boys Jesuit high school: A Separate Peace by John Knowles, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury; some of them I certainly didn’t bother reading, like The Mouse That Roared; and some of them were rather ambitious assignments for 14-year-olds, like Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and, yes, Ordinary People.

The backstory behind Ordinary People’s publication is remarkable: Guest had no agent and no contacts with publishers when she finished the novel, which she wrote over three years while working as a teacher. When Viking accepted it, it was the first unsolicited “over-the-transom” project they had published since 1949. She didn’t have an agent when Robert Redford bought the film rights; after the book’s initial success, Guest completed further deals with Ballantine Paperbacks and Reader’s Digest on her own.

The novel tells the story of the Jarretts, a suburban Chicago family of four whose life in 1975 should seem like the realization of the American Dream. But one son of picture-perfect parents is dead from a boating accident on Lake Michigan for which their second and only other child, Conrad, has survivor’s guilt; when the book opens, he is back from a long time out in a mental institution after attempting suicide. 

Conrad isn’t the only one who needs someone to help him process his grief. The therapists and soul-searching moments that appear throughout give the book a kind of Prince of Tides-meets-“Good Will Hunting” vibe, though it of course predated the Conroy novel by one decade and the Robin Williams movie by two. 

Ordinary People won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best first novel in 1976 and sold well that year, though reviews were mixed. Some pundits thought Guest’s dialogue and dramatic moments unrealistic and too carefully tailored. “The book is not free from flaws—the obvious, constantly recurring hints about the mother, an almost precision-timed drifting into self-possession, a rather romantic conclusion,” Joseph J. McHugh, S.J., wrote in a review for America that year, “but Ordinary People has an irreducible seductive power about it, and I have not stopped talking about it since I first read it two months ago.” The novel, he wrote, “is an extraordinarily well written chronicle of self-discovery and recovery from mental illness.”

More than that, of course, it is a story about loss, and about a family’s capacity to recover from the worst kind a parent can imagine. Can the Jarretts do it? Can anyone do it? Redford’s 1980 movie by the same name introduced whole new audiences both to the Jarretts and to that brutal question. In his review of the film, longtime America editor Richard Blake, S.J., noted the radically different ways people respond to such loss:

“Deep down things,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins tells us, dwells “the dearest freshness.” Deep down dwells at times a pain too sharp to endure or an emptiness too terrifying to admit. In fear, or hope, some turn to God, some to psychiatry. Others develop elaborate strategies for living on surfaces, like motes on a bubble. For them survival depends on not looking deep down things.

Redford’s movie (his directorial debut), Blake noted, “chronicles the strategy of retreat.” The trappings of wealth and the illusion of harmony “entomb the Jarretts in a china closet of pain. Privilege of birth and wealth have made them objects to be viewed from without, like a Belleek tea service.” Parents Calvin (Donald Sutherland) and Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) and son Conrad (Timothy Hutton) are each fragile in his or her own way, and “once removed from the shelf, they know that they risk shattering those delicate surfaces: Conrad in the clutter of the doctor’s office, Calvin as he jogs to the point of exhaustion in the woods and Beth, by contrast, as she fights to maintain her existence behind those glass, dust-proof doors until she can find another sanctuary.”

America poetry editor Joe Hoover, S.J., noted upon Redford’s passing last year that “Ordinary People” is his favorite movie—a strange thing, he wrote, to have to confess: 

It’s like saying a hurricane is my favorite natural disaster, leukemia my favorite medical diagnosis. The film is just so hard, so painful and devastating and truthful. There is barely a false note to be found. To say that the 1980 movie about a Midwestern family caught in a slow-burn crisis “hit close to home” is a vast understatement. The movie knew my address. It ran its fingers over the brushed velvet stripes of our living-room wallpaper. It listened in on our conversations and recorded, especially, what was unspoken, silent.

Hoover was joined by James Martin, S.J., on an episode of the America podcast “Jesuitical” last year to discuss the film and book. Like Brother Hoover, Father Martin also had high praise for Redford’s craft—and for Guest’s novel.

They’re not alone: In 1980, “Ordinary People” won the Academy Award for Best Picture, while Redford won for Best Director, Hutton for Best Supporting Actor and Alvin Sargent for Best Adapted Screenplay. 

Another fan of the film, we discovered last year, is a Chicago native much in the news: Pope Leo XIV. In November 2025, before a meeting with members of the “World of Cinema” at the Vatican, Pope Leo named four favorite films: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Sound of Music,” “Life is Beautiful” and, yes, “Ordinary People.”

Guess who’s not a fan of Ordinary People? Folks who worry about our high school-aged children being exposed to themes of sex, mental illness or family dysfunction. Because as we all well know, they’ll otherwise never encounter any of that sort of thing.

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is “Tomato Trionfale,” by Kelli Logan Rush. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.