Daddy

After eighteen years as a wife and mother, Sarah decides to study at Harvard. She feels she gave up an independent, promising life for the sake of her household, and she leaves. Her husband Oliver stays behind with their three children: Benjamin, Melissa and young Sam.

Oliver has to raise them largely alone, and he has to rebuild himself while he does it. New relationships follow, first with Megan Townsend and later with Charlotte. At the same time he faces changes in his own parents' lives: his widowed father's late-life turn and his mother's decline with Alzheimer's disease.

The novel follows each member of the family as they absorb the break. Benjamin is the eldest. He leaves school when his girlfriend becomes pregnant, and he tries to make a grown-up life for himself well before he is ready for one.

Published by Delacorte Press on October 1, 1989, it is Danielle Steel's twenty-fifth novel. The question it keeps returning to is what children pay when their parents' marriage ends, and whether a father can find a second chance once the plan he built his life around is gone.