
Reader Score
71%
71% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 8 reviews on

An NPR best book of the year
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