Curtis Sittenfeld

I loved this book so much. It fits nicely in my reading niche: emotionally astute, witty, feminist undertones, a writer’s inner monologue—including all the usual neuroses. Reading this felt both familiar and fresh, felt like I was both in a place I’ve been and a place I want to be.

The structure is organized into three different acts, and I equally enjoyed all three sections: The first third takes place almost entirely in The Night Owls building in NYC where it felt like Sally, the narrator and later-night TV sketch writer, was a Liz Lemon facsimile in her own 30 Rock, working a regular week of preparing for the week’s late-night show. The second part of the book was all email correspondences between Sally and Noah, the famous musician and former guest host of TNO (the SNL-type show). I always love the inclusion of letters or emails; it eliminates all fillers, leaving you with just the relationship development. The last third takes place between LA and KC at the beginning of the COVID-shutdown—a surreal moment in recent history that allows for a surreal moment in Sally’s life.

If you like stories of writers who overthink things like the unexplainable rules of attraction, this may be the book for you. I personally couldn’t put it down (which is hard when there aren’t really chapters but more like 3 acts and you just want to get to the next chapter before stopping). This was a five-star read for me, meaning there’s nothing I’d change about it.… (mais)

Well, I read it. I finished it. And I'm not as entirely entranced by it as the many reviewers quoted on the book's cover. The cover is part of the problem. It reveals that our heroine, a bookish only child born into a completely ordinary family, becomes in due course, America's First Lady. Laura Bush in fact, though this account is in no way an attempt at a bigraphy. I really wish I hadn't known, as it hugely spoilt my enjoyment of the first sections of this 4 part book. Each section deals with a different decade or so of Alice's life. A horrible accident defines her later teenage years; a successful professional career, though a less successful personal life her late twenties, and so on. She goes on to describe her unlikely marriage to a man that it's quite astonishing to realise eventually becomes the president of the US.

The characters are believable, the depiction of day -to-day family and working life too. 500 pages in, I'm getting slightly bored at the unremitting detail (who cares about pizza toppings?)but at the same time, it fills out our understanding of Alice and her world. We can sympathise in the end with her compromises, her moral dilemmas..... and above all be glad that finally, after 630 pages, the book finally comes to an end.… (mais)