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"Wolitzer, Meg, author"
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This is my life
The third book by New York Times bestselling author Meg Wolitzer (originally published as This Is Your Life ), is a smart, witty and perceptive novel about the daughters of a female stand-up comic who watch as their mother struggles to balance her career with the needs of her children. Dottie Engels, comedienne extraordinaire, performs her act in Vegas and on late-night TV. Her two daughters, Opal and Erica, live on the periphery of her glittering life, seeing her on the television screen more often than they do at home. But when Dottie's ratings begin to slide, it takes both her daughters to save Dottie from herself. Displaying Wolitzer's signature style that combines keen observations, compassion for her characters, sharp humor, and a strong social hook, This Is My Life expertly captures the uncertainties of adolescence and the trials of growing up in the shadow of a mother who is caught between the conflicting pulls of fame and family.
Book
Even sex surveys can be a yawn
Burning Desires: Sex in America By Steve Chapple and David Talbot Doubleday, 378 pages, $18.95 \"Nowadays, instead of mystery and excitement, we have a performance ethic about sex. You're supposed to keep your circuits unjammed, you're supposed to climb on regularly, you're supposed to have good orgasms of the right kind. And it's deeply tedious.\" These are the words of Germaine Greer, and although they seem surprisingly jaded coming from the ex-high priestess of the sexual revolution, after reading \"Burning Desires,\" the reader nods in sympathy. What becomes clear over the course of this alternately fascinating and frivolous account of the American way of sex is that too much of one thing almost always results in a dulling of the senses. Author Steve Chapple and David Talbot make a game try at staying chipper and alert throughout their cross-country, cross-cultural, pan-sexual tour of the hearts and libidos of Americans, but finally there is something unavoidably tedious about the subject matter.
Newspaper Article
Putting the pieces together Mona Simpson's heroine seeks the meaning of her life
Mona Simpson's first novel, \"Anywhere But Here,\" was the sort of book that left readers wanting to know more. Rich in feeling and complex in its intelligence about the difficult love between a mother and daughter, it deservedly captured a large audience. Simpson had plumbed the lives of her principal characters-a young girl named Ann Stevenson and her emotionally disturbed mother-and created a whole world. \"Anywhere But Here\" felt complete; to want more of it was, perhaps, to care more about the endlessly fascinating details of Ann and her mother than about the satisfying structure of the book itself. And now, with her remarkable second novel, \"The Lost Father,\" Simpson has written a sequel that gives us another complete world. Once again we meet Ann, who is now a grown woman, a 28-year-old medical student living apart from her mother, whom she left 10 years before. Sometimes going under her birth name, Mayan Atassi, Ann as an adult is a substantially different character from Ann as a girl. When we saw her last, her energies were absorbed by her troubled and omnipresent mother; this time around, Ann spends her life fantasizing about the long-absent father she hardly knew.
Newspaper Article
Sleepwalking
The debut novel from New York Times bestselling author Meg Wolitzer, a story of three college students' shared fascination with poetry and death, and how one of them must face difficult truths in order to leave her obsession behind. Published when she was only twenty-three and written while she was a student at Brown, Sleepwalking marks the beginning of Meg Wolitzer's acclaimed career. Filled with her usual wisdom, compassion and insight, Sleepwalking tells the story of the three notorious \"death girls,\" so called on the Swarthmore campus because they dress in black and are each absorbed in the work and suicide of a different poet: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Wolitzer's creation Lucy Asher, a gifted writer who drowned herself at twenty-four. At night the death girls gather in a candlelit room to read their heroines' work aloud. But an affair with Julian, an upperclassman, pushes sensitive , struggling Claire Danziger -- she of the Lucy Asher obsession -- to consider to what degree her \"death girl\" identity is really who she is. As she grapples with her feelings for Julian, her own understanding of herself and her past begins to shift uncomfortably and even disturbingly. Finally, Claire takes drastic measures to confront the facts about herself that she has been avoiding for years.
Book
Life in a New York suburb, from an idiosyncratic point of view
The Moralist of the Alphabet Streets By Fabienne Marsh Algonquin Books, 238 pages, $17.95 An engaging cast of characters inhabits the \"Alphabet Streets\" of a New York suburb in Fabienne Marsh's second novel. This is a neighborhood in an old-fashioned sense; everyone is constantly colliding and interfering and learning each others' secrets. There's little privacy, but no one seems to mind. At the heart of both the neighborhood and the novel stands \"moralist\" Meredith Saunders, an 18-year-old redhead with a flair for describing everything and everyone in her midst: The novel takes place one summer when Meredith's parents are away in Paris on their second honeymoon, and her grandmother, her sisters and one of her sister's children come to stay. The absence of parents is a deft touch, and gives Meredith's household a satisfyingly anarchic feel. Grandmother Grace, 86 and possessed of strong opinions, says of her own sister, \"I hate Marietta with all my heart. . . . My red hair's made her jealous of me from the day I was born.\" And Meredith's sister Lenore has come home to recover from her marriage to a man whose \"family history is pickled in alcohol.\"
Newspaper Article
Belzhar
Jam Gallahue, fifteen, unable to cope with the loss of her boyfriend Reeve, is sent to a therapeutic boarding school in Vermont, where a journal-writing assignment for an exclusive, mysterious English class transports her to the magical realm of Belzhar, where she and Reeve can be together.
Book
If each family is an island, this one really stands alone
In Cathleen Schine's critically praised first novel, \"Alice in Bed,\" the eponymous heroine spends the entire book in the hospital. Now, in Schine's second novel, \"To the Birdhouse,\" Alice is up and about, and it's a good thing, too; her family needs her. Who else but Alice can protect her mother from the hopelessly annoying, lovesick, vengeful Louie Scifo? And who else but Cathleen Schine can graft a delicate comedy of manners onto a slapstick farce with such unerring poise and wit? The novel opens with a familiar, all-purpose convention, the wedding scene. And right away we're given a chance to meet the important characters: the bride Alice, a photographer of birds; her new husband Peter, a sweet, distracted baseball statistician who \"resembled a great, gawky adolescent-all hands and feet and untied shoelaces\"; Alice's mother, unorthodox child psychologist Brenda Brody; and, finally, Brenda's boyfriend, Louie Scifo, who hops from table to table at the reception, sticking cards that read \"Scifo Art Gallery Including TOP Jewels and Gems\" into all the centerpieces.
Newspaper Article
The female persuasion
Greer Kadetsky is a shy college freshman when she meets the woman she hopes will change her life. Faith Frank, dazzlingly persuasive and elegant at sixty-three, has been a central pillar of the women's movement for decades, a figure who inspires others to influence the world. Upon hearing Faith speak for the first time, Greer, madly in love with her boyfriend, Cory, but still full of longing for an ambition that she can't quite place, feels her inner world light up. An invitation to make something out of that sense of purpose, leads Greer down the most exciting path of her life as it winds toward and away from her meant-to-be love story with Cory and the future she'd always imagined.
Book
An aimless odyssey redeemed by vision
Like the life of its protagonist, this first novel consists of a series of dreamy, casually linked fragments sometimes reminiscent of a long, disjointed psychoanalytic session. Memories give way to other memories, and what story there is unfolds in a decidedly nonlinear fashion. \"Intimacy\" does have a plot of sorts, but what propels the narrative is not so much what happens as how Cecilia Cronstein, the narrator, responds to what happens. She is a woman who is both careless and deeply passionate, casualty and survivor. The narrator compares herself with J. D. Salinger's Seymour Glass, who commits suicide in the story \"A Perfect Day for Bananafish,\" but in fact Susan Chace's Cecilia is more like one of Joan Didion's characters: affectless, damaged and lyrical, and somehow trapped in an arid Western setting.
Newspaper Article