Crooked Heart
Lissa Evans, 2014 (U.S.,2015)
HarperCollins
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062364838
Summary
Paper Moon meets the Blitz in this original black comedy, set in World War II England, chronicling an unlikely alliance between a small time con artist and a young orphan evacuee.
When Noel Bostock—aged ten, no family—is evacuated from London to escape the Nazi bombardment, he lands in a suburb northwest of the city with Vera Sedge—a thirty-six-year old widow drowning in debts and dependents. Always desperate for money, she’s unscrupulous about how she gets it.
Noel’s mourning his godmother Mattie, a former suffragette. Wise beyond his years, raised with a disdain for authority and an eclectic attitude toward education, he has little in common with other children and even less with the impulsive Vee, who hurtles from one self-made crisis to the next.
The war’s provided unprecedented opportunities for making money, but what Vee needs—and what she’s never had—is a cool head and the ability to make a plan.
On her own, she’s a disaster. With Noel, she’s a team.
Together, they cook up a scheme. Crisscrossing the bombed suburbs of London, Vee starts to make a profit and Noel begins to regain his interest in life. But there are plenty of other people making money out of the war—and some of them are dangerous. Noel may have been moved to safety, but he isn’t actually safe at all. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—the West Midlands, England, UK
• Education—M.D., New Castle Uiniversity
• Awards—Baileys Women's Prize (formerly, Orange Prize)
• Currently—lives in London, Englandb
Lissa Evans (Felicity Kenvyn) is a British television director, producer and author.
After qualifying as a doctor in 1983, Lissa worked in medicine in Newcastle for four years before a brief period in stand-up comedy. She started with an ensemble review called "Wire Less Wireless" which played in some of the pubs in Newcastle.
Lissa joined BBC Radio where she was a producer of comedy programmes before migrating to television. She has produced and/or directed such shows as Father Ted (for which she won a BAFTA for best comedy), Room 101, The Kumars at No. 42, TV Heaven, Telly Hell, Crossing the Floor (for which she won an Emmy for best drama) and Have I Got News For You.
In addition to her television work, Lissa has written four novels for adults: Spencer's List (2002), Odd One Out (2004), Their Finest Hour and a Half (2009) (long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction) and Crooked Heart (2014, 2015 in the US).
She also wrote two novels for children. The first, Small Change For Stuart, came out in 2011 and was shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Award for Children's fiction, the 2012 Carnegie Medal, and the 2012 Branford Boase Award. (It was published in the US as "Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms").
Her second child's novel, is the Stuart sequel, Big Change for Stuart ("Horten's Incredible Illusions" in the US). It was published in 2012. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/2/2015.)
Book Reviews
In Crooked Heart, Lissa Evans’s absorbing and atmospheric comic novel, another quietly heroic orphan joins the canon….This is a wonderfully old-fashioned Dickensian novel, with satisfying plot twists….Both darkly funny and deeply touching….It’s a crooked journey, straight to the heart.
New York Times Book Review
Evans tidily unfolds a satisfying plot…. But it’s the over-arching development of the lost little boy and the harried woman’s affection and admiration for one another that really tugs the reader’s own heart crooked.... There’s great galloping joy in it.
Independent (UK)
Entertaining.... The story starts in the London blitz, in a dazzling, tragicomic prologue…. Crooked Heart is a dark comedy, moving between drollery, pathos, farce and harrowing moments of tragic insight.
Guardian (UK)
Deceptively complex and utterly charming.
Sunday Mirror (UK)
This autumn’s feel-good novel teams up two unlikely characters at the outbreak of World War II…. Evans has written an old-fashioned comedy of manners, which is heartwarming, without being mawkish, and extremely funny.
Daily Mail (UK)
I try not to say, "If there’s one novel you should read this summer..." but Crooked Heart tempts me to say it.
Scott Simon - NPR
Evans’ exceptionally engaging Crooked Heart brings effervescent wit and oddball whimsy to a venerable formula.... The entire novel is a joy from start to finish: briskly paced, taut and snappy with humor and, ultimately, sweet.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Noel’s precociousness, combined with the distrust of authority...makes him a difficult child...and though Vera has enough of her own troubles, somehow the two of them—awkwardly but endearingly—find a connection.... [An] appealing blend of sophisticated bravado and naive fragility—all without lapsing into sentimentality.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Evans explores the Blitz during World War II from two utterly inventive perspectives—that of a sharp-minded ten-year-old orphan evacuee and the unscrupulous and desperate 36-year-old suburban widow.... A charming, slanted counterpoint to Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. —Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA
Library Journal
A clever orphan and his scam-artist guardian—an odd couple in wartime London—explore the space between legally wrong and morally right. Engaging and comic.... A dark, cherishable, very English comedy about not-so-funny times and events.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Crooked Heart:
1. Probably the best place to start with this book is this: what did you think about the characters? Were your attitudes toward them different at the beginning of the book then they were by the end? If so, how do the characters change from start to finish? Or if the characters don't change, what does?
2. Most novels about World War II and the London Blitz focus on characters' heroism and bravery. What do you think about Evans's approach—honing in on characters who are hardly heroic, who take advantage of the generosity of others in times of crisis? Do desparate circumstances excuse Noel and Vee? Which type of person—the scoundrel or hero—is more prevalent in humanity...or in ourselves?
3. Reviewers are like Polonious in Hamlet, referring to Crooked Heart as comical-tragical, tragical-comical.... What do you think? Is it one...or the other...or both? If both, where does the line between comedy and tragedy fall (or blur)? Point to some areas where the writing is particularly humorous...or to other areas where it's not.
4. Lots of twists and turns in this novel: did you "see it coming"...or where you taken by surprise at the turn of events. Reviewers frequently mention Dickens. Do you see parallels?
5. Satisfying ending...or not?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Beautiful Bureaucrat
Helen Phillips, 2015
Henry Holt, Inc.
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781627793766
Summary
In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database.
After a long period of joblessness, she's not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings—the office's scarred pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls.
When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread.
As other strange events build to a crescendo, the haunting truth about Josephine's work begins to take shape in her mind, even as something powerful is gathering its own form within her. She realizes that in order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond.
Both chilling and poignant, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a novel of rare restraint and imagination. With it, Helen Phillips enters the company of Murakami, Bender, and Atwood as she twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder—luminous and new. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1981
• Wjere—state of Colorado, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., Brooklyn College
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Helen Phillips is the author of the novels, Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015) and The Need (2019). She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and the Italo Calvino Prize, among others. Her collection, And Yet They Were Happy, was also a finalist for the McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns Prize, and her work has been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts and appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, Slice, BOMB, Mississippi Review, and PEN America.
Phillips has been an assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Unusual...deeply interesting.... It's an irresistible setup and if that's all there were, it would be enough... [But] Mrs. Phillips has a wickedly funny eye, a fine sense of pacing, a smooth, winning writing style and a great gift for a telling detail... [Joseph and Josephine's] love—playful, supportive, cozy—steels them for the existential and metaphysical storms raging around them, big questions about life, death, birth, marriage, the office, the ructions in nature, the vagaries of the imagination, the foibles of people, free will, fate, the confusion of the past, the promise of the future...breathtaking and wondrous.
Sarah Lyall - New York Times
Riveting...Phillips's thrillerlike pacing and selection of detail as the novel unfolds is highly skilled...What makes The Beautiful Bureaucrat a unique contribution to the body of existential literature is its trajectory, as the story telescopes in two directions, both outward to post macro questions about Gd and the universe, and inward to post intimate inquiries about marriage and fidelity. Ultimately, The Beautiful Bureaucrat succeeds because it isn't afraid to ask the deepest questions.
Jamie Quatro - New York Times Book Review
Equal parts mystery, thriller, and existential inquiry, Phillips's book evokes the menace of the mundane...The Beautiful Bureaucrat asks uneasy questions about work and life, love and power, and where the whole enterprise of one's own small life is swiftly headed.
Anna Wiener - New Republic
Kafka would love The Beautiful Bureaucrat...Bizarre and painfully human...There's not a wasted word, and it's nearly impossible to put down. Phillips is a master at evoking claustrophobic spaces...It's a deeply tense book, but never a manipulative one. It's also quite funny. Phillips' sense of humor is bizarre, dark but not oppressive...tempered by [her] exuberance, her humor, and her very real sense of joyful defiance. It's a surprising revelation of a book from an uncompromising author as unique as she is talented.
Michael Schaub - NPR
Part dystopian fantasy, part thriller, part giddy literary-nerd wordplay, Helen Phillips' The Beautiful Bureaucrat is both a page-turner and a novel rich in evocative, starkly philosophical language...eerie, stomach-dropping...this novel ultimately proves both clever and impossible to put down.
Los Angeles Times
[A] joyride...very weird, very beautiful, very honest book about the surreal business of working in a city, living in a fertile and dying body, and loving another mortal.... While it may have DNA in common with other urban work and life and love stories, with Kafka and Shirley Jackson and Haruki Murakami and the Coen brothers, it really is a new species of tale.... Readers follow Josephine on a tightrope walk over the abyss, where the stakes are total, and the prose is exuberant and taut, dire and playful.
Karen Russell - Slate
Propulsive...gorgeous...stark and spare genius.... A masterpiece of contrasts.... Phillips plays with language in a way that serves both characterization and plot, showcasing her inimitable wit.... Beckett and Nabokov would resoundingly applaud.... The humor and the seriousness in an absurdist story build a tension that carries the entire world within it. Phillips pulls this off seamlessly.... A joy, darkness and terror and all.
Seattle Review of Books
With some of the conspiratorial paranoia of Pynchon, some of the poignant comical darkness of Kafka and some of the interior tenderness of contemporary literary fiction...What Helen Phillips has created is, finally, an intriguing fictional world in which love and language meet their match in routine and necessity—and who, or which, triumphs may be a reader's choice
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Uncanny and Kafkaesque.... By turns, the novel is goofily funny, creepy and unsettling, life-affirming and sweet, deeply thoughtful and pointedly critical of modern workplace culture.... A strange, yet unsettlingly resonant, fable that melds mystery, sci-fi, romance and satire to chillingly skewer the modern workplace yet somehow leave us reaffirmed in our humanity.
Claire Fallon - Huffington Post
Phillips's novel incisively depicts the corporate hell in which young drones toil in faceless buildings, sorting meaningless files according to inscrutable policies.... The novel has enough horror and mordant humor to carry the reader effortlessly through its punchy send-up of entry-level institutionalization.
Publishers Weekly
[A] seemingly meaningless clerical job in a faceless building in a big city that is gradually revealed to have consequences worthy of a Twilight Zone episode.... Suspenseful, creepy, and distinct, this work is sparse in style but elaborate in wordplay. For readers who like their literary fiction with a side of sf. —Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Library Journal
Phillips's first novel is peculiar, mysterious, and intriguing, bringing to mind the visceral symbolism of Margaret Atwood's dystopian works. Clever wordplay toys with readers while hinting at a deeper commentary on the meaning of life.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [P]art love story, part urban thriller.... [T]his novel offers no easy answers—its deeper meanings may mystify—but it grabs you up, propels you along, and leaves you gasping, grasping, and ready to read it again.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these talking points to help start a discussion for The Beautiful Bureaucrat:
1. Talk about the way Helen Phillips portrays Josephine's job and the atmosphere of the institution in which she works. What is the author sugesting about the contemporary workplace? Does her description resonate with your own experiences?
2. Reviewers have compared Phillips writing to surrealistis or existentialsts like Kafka, Camus, Orwell, and more recently Pynchon, Murakami and Atwood. Why might Phillips have chosen to write in this surrealist genre? How does it affect your experience reading the book? Do you find her style illuminating, overly symbolic and obscure, humorous, dead-on accurate?
3. What does the boss mean when he tells Josephine that "you need the Database as much as the Database needs you”?
4. How much in this book brings to mind the revelations by Edward Snowden about U.S. government surveillance...or perhaps the Thought Police in George Orwell's 1984? Are other there parallels, either to literature or real-life events?
5. Phillips seems to be posing some large philosophical issues:
- Are humans merely pawns in an institutional or cosmic game of power?
- Are we predestined for heaven or hell? Or are we endowed with free will?
- Do we have a purpose in life? Or is life meaningless?
- What compensatory power does love offer?
Talk about some of those questions—and how they are reflected in The Beautiful Bureaucrat. What other issues are raised? Does the book offer any concrete answers?
6. In what way might Trishiffany and the Person With Bad Breath (PWBB) stand in for a kind of deity?
7. What is the religious and mythical significance of Joseph's handing a pomegranate to Josephine and then telling her he's found them a "garden apartment"? (Note the book's cover.) In hindsight, how does that act portend what happens next? What other Judeo-Christian symbology do you see in the novel?
8. How would you describe the characters—Josephine and Joseph, Hillary, and Trishiffany. Do they come alive for you—are they convincing? Do you care about them, particularly Josephine? Or do you find them overly determined or drawn with a heavy-hand?
9. Do you find the book's conclusion satisfying? Do you find the book satisfying?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
736 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804172707
Summary
Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light.
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition.
There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.
Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.
In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance. (From the publisher.)
See our Reading Guide for Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees.
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1974-75
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Raised—in New York City, Baltimore, states of Texas and Hawaii
• Education—B.A., Smith College
• Awards—Man Booker Prize (long-list)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist and travel writer of Hawaiian ancestry. Her first novel, The People in the Trees, based on the real-life case of the virologist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, was widely praised as one of the best novels of 2013.
In 2015, her second novel, A Little Life was published, also to highly favorable reviews—and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Yanagihara was also an editor-at-large at Conde Nast Traveler. She is now a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/1/2015.)
Book Reviews
[A] stunning work of fiction.
Sherryl Connelly - New York Daily News
Yanagihara’s immense new book, A Little Life, announces her, as decisively as a second work can, as a major American novelist. Here is an epic study of trauma and friendship written with such intelligence and depth of perception that it will be one of the benchmarks against which all other novels that broach those subjects (and they are legion) will be measured.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
Yanagihara's most impressive trick is the way she glides from scenes filled with those terrifying hyenas to moments of epiphany. "Wasn't it a miracle to have survived the unsurvivable? Wasn't friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely? Wasn't this house, this beauty, this comfort, this life a miracle?" A Little Life devotes itself to answering those questions, and is, in its own dark way, a miracle.
Marion Winik - Long Island Newsday
Through insightful detail and her decade-by-decade examination of these people’s lives, Yanagihara has drawn a deeply realized character study that inspires as much as devastates. It’s a life, just like everyone else’s, but in Yanagihara’s hands, it’s also tender and large, affecting and transcendent; not a little life at all.
Nicole Lee - Washington Post
A Little Life floats all sorts of troubling questions about the responsibility of the individual to those nearest and dearest and the sometime futility of playing brother’s keeper. Those questions, accompanied by Yanagihara’s exquisitely imagined characters, will shadow your dreamscapes.
Jan Stuart - Boston Globe
There are truths here that are almost too much to bear—that hope is a qualified thing, that even love, no matter how pure and freely given, is not always enough. This book made me realize how merciful most fiction really is, even at its darkest, and it's a testament to Yanagihara's ability that she can take such ugly material and make it beautiful.
Steph Cha - Los Angeles Times
Astonishing... It’s not hyperbole to call this novel a masterwork—if anything that word is simply just too little for it.
Caroline Leavitt, San Francisco Chronicle
A Little Life is a harrowing novel with no happy ending, yet Yanagihara writes so well that it’s difficult to put it down, even in the midst of sobbing. Somehow, it’s an ordeal to read and a transformative experience, not soon forgotten.
Anna Andersen - Minneapolis Star-Tribune
With her sensitivity to everything from the emotional nuance to the play of light inside a subway car, Yanagihara is superb at capturing the radiant moments of beauty, warmth and kindness that help redeem the bad stuff. In A Little Life, it's life's evanescent blessings that maybe, but only maybe, can save you.
John Powers - NPR
A Little Life becomes a surprisingly subversive novel—one that uses the middle-class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery. And having upset our expectations once, Yanagihara does it again, by refusing us the consolations we have come to expect from stories that take such a dark turn…. Yanagihara’s novel can also drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life. Like the axiom of equality, A Little Life feels elemental, irreducible—and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it.
Jon Michaud - The New Yorker
This exquisite, unsettling novel follows four male friends from their meeting as students at a prestigious Northeastern college through young adulthood and into middle age.... The book shifts from a generational portrait to something darker and more tender: an examination of the depths of human cruelty, counterbalanced by the restorative powers of friendship.
The New Yorker (in "Briefly Noted")
Spring's must-read novel.... If [Yanagihara's] assured 2013 debut, The People in the Trees, a dark allegory of Western hubris, put her on the literary map, her massive new novel...signals the arrival of a major new voice in fiction."
Megan O'Grady - Vogue
[The] book has so much richness in it—great big passages of beautiful prose, unforgettable characters, and shrewd insights into art and ambition and friendship and forgiveness.
Leah Greenblatt - Entertainment Weekly
[A] monument of empathy, and that alone makes this novel wondrous.
Claire Fallon - Huffington Post
[A]n epic American tragedy.... There is real pleasure in following characters over such a long period, as they react to setbacks and successes, and, in some cases, change. By the time the characters reach their 50s and the story arrives at its moving conclusion, readers will...find them very hard to forget.
Publishers Weekly
Yanagihara fearlessly broaches difficult topics while simultaneously creating... [a] carring and sensitive] environment.... [F]for those strong of stomach or bold enough to follow the characters' road of friendship, this heartbreaking story certainly won't be easily forgotten. —Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions...and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.... The phrase "tour de force" could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for A Little Life:
1. Why the title, A Little Life? Certainly Jude's life is hardly insignificant or small. Here's what Hanya Yanagihara said when asked by Newsweek if the title is ironic: "All life is small.... Life will end in death and unhappiness, but we do it anyway." The Newsweek interviewer referred to the author's view of life as tragic and futile. Does that make it small? What do you think?
2. An editor once advised Yanagihara to trim the amount of time spent on Jude's childhood, arguing that concentrating so heavily on his physical and psychological deprivations would repulse readers. Yanagihara refused to cut. What do you think? Should she have trimmed the sections? How difficult or painful were those passages for you?
3. Talk about the four main characters: Willem, JB, and Malcolm, as well as Jude. How are they similar, how are they different, and what is behind the strength of their long-lasting friendships? How would you compare their male friendship to those among women?
4. A Little Life focuses heavily on the inner lives of its characters, with very little attention paid to exterior surroundings. Do you feel the interiority slows the book down, makes it drag in parts? Or do you find the inward focus enriches the story, making it compelling, even enthralling?
5. Were you disappointed with the lack of central, well-developed female characters? Yanagihara, again in Newsweek, said that “men are offered a much, much smaller emotional vocabulary to work with,” which makes them more challenging to write about. Women, on the other hand, have a well-trod emotional landscape and are less interesting to her as a writer. What are your thoughts?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Alexandra Kleeman, 2015
HarperCollins
3045 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062388674
Summary
An intelligent and madly entertaining debut novel that is at once a missing-person mystery, an exorcism of modern culture, and a wholly singular vision of contemporary womanhood from a terrifying and often funny voice of a new generation.
A woman known only by the letter A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality show called That’s My Partner!
A eats (or doesn’t) the right things, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials—particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert—and models herself on a standard of beauty that only exists in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a news-celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up his local Wally Supermarket’s entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal.
Meanwhile B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C’s pornography addiction, and becomes indoctrinated by a new religion spread throughout a web of corporate franchises, which moves her closer to the decoys that populate her television world, but no closer to her true nature. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1985-86
• Raised—Colorado, Japan, and elsewhere
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.F.A., Columbia University; Ph.D., University of
California-Berkeley (working towrd)
• Currently—lives in Staten Island, New York
Alexandra Kleeman, whose parents are both professors, grew up in places like Japan and Colorado. She started blogging in high school, joking, "I was pretty big in the Asian-American web log community."
After high school, Kleeman went to Brown University, where she studied cognitive science and creative writing. She received her M.F.A in fiction from Columbia University and is working toward her Ph.D. in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.
At the age of 24, Kleeman published her first short story in the Paris Review and has continued to write for the Review as well as for Zoetrope, Guernica, Tin House, and n+1. She has received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Santa Fe Art Institute.
Currently, Kleemena lives on Staten Island with her fiance, the novelist Alex Gilvarry. (Adapted from the publisher and Observer.com.)
Book Reviews
This is not a breezy summer read, but it’s cerebral, sharp, funny - and worth the ride.
New York Post
A satirical and searing critique of modern-day womanhood.
Chicago Tribune
Kleeman serves up a clever satire of our culture’s ever intensifying obsession with health, diet, and body image
Los Angeles Magazine.
The smartest, strangest novel I’ve read in a while (Staff Pick).
Paris Review
This debut novel by future superstar Alexandra Kleeman will be the thing to be seen reading this summer. Pick it up if you want to up your summer cool factor . . . . .Very funny, perfectly weird, a hyperintelligent commentary on a culture obsessed with you and fame.
Vanity Fair
Alexandra Kleeman has written Fight Club for girls.
Vogue.com
Excellent.... Sprinkled with detailed summaries of invented advertisements, the book describes a consumer landscape just on the far side of plausible. You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is a story about realizing you’re hungry and trying to find out what for.
Slate
Her darkly satirical debut lays bare the ravages of advertising-fueled culture and consumerism, through a purposefully distorted version of our reality. Fans of DeLillo, Pynchon and Shteyngart are advised to take note.
Huffington Post
Alexandra Kleeman’s brilliant debut novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine is at once eerie and strange and beautiful, an incisive commentary on contemporary culture and womanhood.
Buzzfeed
Don’t be fooled by the sassy title-the cravings that lurk beneath the surface in this completely original debut will haunt what a body means to you indefinitely.
Marie Claire
(Starred review.) [A] fever dream of modern alienation.... It's a testament to Kleeman's ability that the text itself blurs and begins to run together.... This is a challenging novel, but undoubtedly one with something to say. One wonders what Kleeman will come up with next.
Publishers Weekly
Absurdist observations evoke masters like DeLillo and Pynchon, as well as the “hysterical realism” of Ben Marcus and Tom Perrotta, bringing a refreshingly feminist frame to the postmodern conversation. While ambitious in scope and structure, sharp humor and brisk storytelling ground the existential angst in Kleeman’s page-turning, entertaining performance.
Booklist
"I had hoped happiness would be warmer, cozier, more enveloping. More exciting, like one of the things that happen on TV to TV...." [T]here's writing just like that on nearly every page. At the narrative level, though, this novel barely moves.... Existential paralysis is a great subject for short fiction but a more difficult one for a novel.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine:
1. What is the significance of the book's title, "You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine"?
2. Talk about this novel as social commentary. What aspects of contemporary culture does it comment on? What does it suggest about the quality of our lives and how our aspirations are shaped?
3. The novel has been described as existential, difficult, disorienting, even alienating. Is the book primarily intellectual? Or does it resonate with you on a personal level? If so, what parts in particular?
4. How would you describe A and B and C? Why are they identified as such: why might the author have used letters rather than names for her characters? Do you see any aspect of yourself (or anyone you know) in A, B, or C?
5. Talk about A's fascination with Kandy Kat, both literally (as a plot element in the story) and metaphorically (what it might signify symbolically).
6. Why does A turn to the Church of the Conjoined Eaters? What practices of society does the church satirize?
7. Overall, what does the book suggest about the female body and it's "function" in society? Do you agree with A's view that "A woman’s body never really belongs to herself"?
Who Do You Love
Jennifer Weiner, 2015
Atria
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451617818
Summary
An unforgettable story about true love, real life, and second chances . . .
Rachel Blum and Andy Landis are just eight years old when they meet one night in an ER waiting room. Born with a congenital heart defect, Rachel is a veteran of hospitals, and she’s intrigued by the boy who shows up alone with a broken arm. He tells her his name. She tells him a story. After Andy’s taken back to a doctor and Rachel’s sent back to her bed, they think they’ll never see each other again.
Rachel grows up in an affluent Florida suburb, the popular and protected daughter of two doting parents. Andy grows up poor in Philadelphia with a single mom and a rare talent for running.
Yet, over the next three decades, Andy and Rachel will meet again and again—linked by chance, history, and the memory of the first time they met, a night that changed the course of both of their lives.
A sweeping, warmhearted, and intimate tale, Who Do You Love is an extraordinary novel about the passage of time, the way people change and change each other, and how the measure of a life is who you love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 28, 1970
• Where—De Ridder, Louisiana, USA
• Raised—Simsbury, Connecticut
• Education—B.A., Princeton University
• Currently—lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Jennifer Weiner is an American writer, television producer, and former journalist. She is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Background
Weiner was born in DeRidder, Louisiana, where her father was stationed as an army physician. The next year, her family (including a younger sister and two brothers) moved to Simsbury, Connecticut, where Weiner spent her childhood.
Weiner's parents divorced when she was 16, and her mother came out as a lesbian at age 55. Weiner has said that she was "one of only nine Jewish kids in her high school class of 400" at Simsbury High School. She entered Princeton University at the age of 17 and received her bachelor of arts summa cum laude in English in 1991, having studied with J. D. McClatchy, Ann Lauterbach, John McPhee, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates. Her first published story, "Tour of Duty," appeared in Seventeen magazine in 1992.
After graduating from college, Weiner joined the Centre Daily Times in State College, Pennsylvania, where she managed the education beat and wrote a regular column called "Generation XIII" (referring to the 13th generation following the American Revolution), aka "Generation X." From there, she moved on to Kentucky's Lexington Herald-Leader, still penning her "Generation XIII" column, before finding a job with the Philadelphia Inquirer as a features reporter.
Novels and TV
Weiner continued to write for the Inquirer, freelancing on the side for Mademoiselle, Seventeen, and other publications, until after her first novel, Good in Bed, was published in 2001.
In 2005, her second novel, In Her Shoes (2002), was made into a feature film starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette and Shirley MacLaine by 20th Century Fox. Her sixth novel, Best Friends Forever, was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and made Publishers Weekly's list of the longest-running bestsellers of the year. To date, she is the author of 10 bestselling books, including nine novels and a collection of short stories, with a reported 11 million copies in print in 36 countries.
In addition to writing fiction, Weiner is a co-creator and executive producer of the (now-cancelled) ABC Family sitcom State of Georgia, and she is known for "live-tweeting" episodes of the reality dating shows The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. In 2011, Time magazine named her to its list of the Top 140 Twitter Feeds "shaping the conversation." She is a self-described feminist.
Personal
Weiner married attorney Adam Bonin in October of 2001. They have two children and separated amicably in 2010. As of 2014 she lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with her partner Bill Syken.
Gender bias in the media
Weiner has been a vocal critic of what she sees as the male bias in the publishing industry and the media, alleging that books by male authors are better received than those written by women, that is, reviewed more often and more highly praised by critics. In 2010, she told Huffington Post,
I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book—in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.... I think it's irrefutable that when it comes to picking favorites—those lucky few writers who get the double reviews AND the fawning magazine profile AND the back-page essay space AND the op-ed...the Times tends to pick white guys.
In a 2011 interview with the Wall Street Journal blog Speakeasy, she said, "There are gatekeepers who say chick lit doesn’t deserve attention but then they review Stephen King." When Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom was published in 2010 to critical acclaim and extensive media coverage (including a cover story in Time), Weiner criticized what she saw as the ensuing "overcoverage," igniting a debate over whether the media's adulation of Franzen was an example of entrenched sexism within the literary establishment.
Though Weiner received some backlash from other female writers for her criticisms, a 2011 study by the organization VIDA bore out many of her claims, and Franzen himself, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, agreed with her:
To a considerable extent, I agree. When a male writer simply writes adequately about family, his book gets reviewed seriously, because: "Wow, a man has actually taken some interest in the emotional texture of daily life," whereas with a woman it’s liable to be labelled chick-lit. There is a long-standing gender imbalance in what goes into the canon, however you want to define the canon.
As for the label "chick lit", Weiner has expressed ambivalence towards it, embracing the genre it stands for while criticizing its use as a pejorative term for commercial women's fiction.
I’m not crazy about the label because I think it comes with a built-in assumption that you’ve written nothing more meaningful or substantial than a mouthful of cotton candy. As a result, critics react a certain way without ever reading the books.
In 2008, Weiner published a critique on her blog of a review by Curtis Sittenfeld of a Melissa Bank novel. Weiner deconstructs Sittenfeld's review, writing,
The more I think about the review, the more I think about the increasingly angry divide between ladies who write literature and chicks who write chick lit, the more it seems like a grown-up version of the smart versus pretty games of years ago; like so much jockeying for position in the cafeteria and mocking the girls who are nerdier/sluttier/stupider than you to make yourself feel more secure about your own place in the pecking order.
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/21/2014.)
Book Reviews
Compulsively readable.... Weiner’s skill is in the specifics. There’s no doubt she knows how to delivers a certain kind of story, and well.
New York Times Book Review
A must read... This roller-coaster romance—of two people from two very different sides of the track—proves we can’t choose who we love.
New York Post
This is Weiner's first-ever straightforward love story, centering on two characters,Rachel and Andy, who meet as children in the hospital waiting room. The book chronicles their journey through adulthood, as they determine whether they're soul mates despite wildly different backgrounds: Rachel, from a wealthy family and born with a congenital heart defect; and Andy, from a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia with dreams of running in the Olympics.
Washington Post
Overwhelmingly this is an affecting novel about how people carry the heavy burdens that came with their lives—and how they set them down so they can goon... Weiner draws her characters with empathy and nuance. We take the 30-year journey with them, and root for them along the way.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Readers will laugh, cry and find themselves caught up in the story, as Weiner explores the idea: 'Do soul mates really exist?' Weiner brings the characters to life with intricate details...It's a story about love gained and lost, and love eternal.
Associated Press
Weiner ventured into new territory in her latest entry in her signature genre:popular, smart fiction for and about grown-up women. Who Do You Love opens with Rachel and Andy actually meeting briefly as 8-year-olds in a busy hospital ER waiting room, then quickly separates them for the first time—but not the last—in the story that spans three decades. Told in chapters that alternate between Rachel's and Andy's lives, it's a first for Weiner in that the man essentially gets equal time in one of her books.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jennifer Weiner returns with what might be her best love story yet. The sure-to-be smash is a classic love story, told over the course of two decades, twisted up with modern cultural observations and maybe just a miniature ode to Save the Last Dance and When Harry Met Sally.
Austin Chronicle
It’s The Fault in Our Stars all grown-up: Two kids meet in an ER, cross paths later—and don’t die. Thank you, book gods.
Glamour
A tale of love against the odds...Weiner's latest is a summer heart-warmer.
People
"Weiner has made a career out of conjuring women who have body image problems, falling out of love regularly and are generally relatable to the rest of us... From her first novel, Weiner has a mastery of the telling detail. Her latest novel has a notably more serious tone from her past work. The main characters meet in the hospital when they're both eight years old and spend the rest of the novel moving in and out of each other's lives.
Jewish Forward
(Starred review.) Readers will simultaneously want to savor and devour Weiner’s latest... With her well-known humor and charm, she conveys the essence of first love, particularly the adage that true love never dies. Complete with a riveting, realistic recounting of 9/11 and a plot twist that will make your jaw drop, Weiner’s brilliantly written novel will capture your heart.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Weiner’s latest is pure romance and utterly heart tugging, showcasing her ability to write characters that readers will instantly connect with, flaws and all. There is a special delight here in getting to know Rachel and Andy from childhood to adulthood, and readers will find themselves laughing, crying, and hoping right along with the pair.
Booklist
This moving story of love that spans a lifetime is Weiner at her heartstring-tugging best... There are plenty of twists and turns in their relationship, and it's satisfying to watch them wind their ways toward the novel's perfectly realized conclusion.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How did the novel’s prologue frame your reading experience? Who did you imagine had broken Rachel’s heart, and were you surprised when you ultimately learned who Brenda was?
2. "She hadn’t said goodbye to me. She hadn’t told me enough about what it was like, when you knew you weren’t going to get better. She hadn’t told me if it had hurt" (page 34). How does Alice influence Rachel, and how does this early loss shape her sense of self in the years to come? You might also discuss the symbolism of the Ouija board in this scene. How does this childhood game take on greater meaning for both Alice and Rachel?
3. Compare Rachel’s initial impression to Andy’s first memory of Lori, "his beautiful mom with her red-lipsticked mouth and her hair that fell in ripples down her back." How does Andy’s perception of his mother change as he grows older, and what causes this shift? In what ways is Andy driven by how others perceive him, both for better and for worse?
4. While Andy is growing up, he sometimes worries that his mother "just [doesn’t] like him very much" (page 40). How do you feel the dynamics between Andy and Lori affect the other relationships in Andy’s life? Ultimately, how did you feel Lori’s parenting style positively served Andy—and in what ways did it hurt him?
5. Turn to page 69, where Nana and Rachel are discussing Mrs. Blum’s outburst during the bat mitzvah service. What do you think it means to be "a woman of valor," and why do you think Nana reminds Rachel of this, and the line from Proverbs, at this particular moment? How does Rachel live up to this ideal and in what ways does she fall short over the course of the novel?
6. How did you initially perceive Bethie Botts? As a teenager, do you think you would have acted differently toward her than Rachel and Marissa did on the youth retreat? How did Andy’s treatment of Bethie in the scene on page 130 affect your perspective on each of the characters involved—including Andy himself—and who did you feel for most deeply here? What did you make of Rachel and Bethie’s (now Elizabeth) interaction at their high school reunion? Was there a Bethie in your life—and if so, what would you say to them now?
7. Rachel and Andy’s relationship evolves in starts and stops. What are the external factors that work against them? Compare and contrast how the expectations of others affect how Andy and Rachel see each other, as well as their own expectations of what a happily coupled life should look like. Consider the roles that both time and timing play in their relationship. How does timing pull them apart while time brings them back together?
8. 9/11 is a turning point in the novel, and of course, was a pivotal moment for the world. Like Andy and Rachel, is there someone you would feel compelled to reach out to during a similar kind of crisis? Why do you think most of us have that person in our past whose memory we can’t quite let go of, who we yearn to reach out to when disaster strikes, whether it’s personal or global? Where does that yearning come from—and under normal conditions, what stands in the way of acting on it?
9. Did you feel that Jay and Maisie were better matches for Rachel and Andy? Why or why not? What does the novel seem to say about the roles that compatibility, stability, and desire play in lasting relationships—and how does the notion of "opposites attract" play into this?
10. Mr. Sills proves to be a formative mentor for Andy, but in what ways does he fail him? How do you feel his last words of advice affect Andy’s choices later in the novel?
11. How does the novel illustrate the ways that we love differently at each stage of our lives? How do Andy and Rachel love each other—and those around them—differently over the course of the novel? Does their connection change or is it at its core still the same?
12. A recurring theme in Who Do You Love is brokenness; the most obvious example is Rachel’s "broken heart." Where else do we see how both Rachel and Andy are broken? Despite coming from very different backgrounds, each character is also struggling with self-identity throughout the novel. Compare and contrast the ways in which Andy and Rachel work to fix their brokenness by carving out their own identities—Andy’s focus and drive to achieve a singular goal, as opposed to Rachel’s sometimes messy and circuitous road toward career and family. Where do these two very different paths leave them, and are they still broken at the end of the novel? Ultimately, do you think they help each other heal, or do they heal themselves?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)