Reader Score
70%
70% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 8 reviews on
Recommended Summer Reading according to The New York Times, Elle, Zibby Owens, and the Minnesota Star Tribune
"A dishy work of autofiction that everyone will be talking about."
--The New York Times
A refreshingly irreverent novel about art, desire, domesticity, freedom, and the intricacies of the twenty-first-century female experience, from the acclaimed writer Hannah Pittard
A novelist learns that an unflattering version of herself will appear prominently--and soon--in her ex-husband's debut novel. For a week, her life continues largely unaffected by the news--she cooks, runs, teaches, entertains--but the morning after baking mac 'n' cheese from scratch for her nephew's sixth birthday, she wakes up changed. The contentment she's long enjoyed is gone. In its place: nothing. A remarkably ridiculous midlife crisis ensues, featuring a talking cat and a game called Dead Body.
"The real Ann Beattie has always enjoyed and admired Hannah's ability to convince the reader that ordinary things aren't ordinary, but neither are they necessarily extraordinary--just different, complicated, and worth noticing and thinking about. This book, which either is or isn't a novel, because the real Ann Beattie knows better than to believe in categories, is a wonderful meta turn, and invokes daily life very much the way her, and my, much-appreciated Donald Barthelme would view it: as an of-the-moment 'Critique de la Vie Quotidienne, ' seen through close examination that suggests expansive metaphoric possibilities. Good reading. Really."
--Ann Beattie