About This Book
When Paul Miller's pharmaceutical company goes public overnight, his wife Janice expects the windfall to finally deliver the life she's been promised — instead, she receives a lawyer's letter announcing her husband is leaving her for her tennis partner and cutting her out of the fortune entirely. Four hundred miles away, their older daughter Margaret is watching her feminist magazine collapse and her celebrity boyfriend vanish in the same week, leaving her no choice but to retreat home. And at home, fourteen-year-old Lizzie is quietly unraveling in ways no one has bothered to notice. Over one scorching California summer, three women in the same family discover, separately and together, just how thin the floor beneath a comfortable life really is.
Janelle Brown writes with a sharp, unsentimental eye for the particular delusions of American aspiration — the way families construct elaborate fictions about who they are and what they deserve. The novel toggles between three distinct voices without losing momentum, and Brown is especially precise about the specific humiliations of women who played by the rules and still lost. It's funnier than you'd expect given the subject matter, and more cutting than the breezy premise suggests.
