Tuesday, February 19, 2019

What is Elinor Lipman reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Elinor Lipman, author of Good Riddance.

Her entry begins:
I know you think happy endings are for the sentimental and soft, for the unserious, for the romantically inclined; for the beach. Along the narrative path there is very likely love—its ups and downs, its pain and its pleasures. And if the author follows the excellent examples of William Shakespeare, you’ll probably get a marriage as the tale’s comic closure.

None of these titles are new or necessarily on my night-stand at this moment, but Valentine’s Day is approaching, and I love them with all my heart.

The Republic of Love by Carol Shields
I was lucky enough to review this book, a novel less known than her Pulitzer-Prize-winning Stone Diaries, when it was released in 1992, and I opened my rave, “Try to imagine a more delicious premise for a novel: a 35-year-old high-achieving folklorist who studies mermaid legends meets a thrice-divorced 40-year-old radio deejay, provoking an instant, intense devotion that neither -- as romance-starved as they are -- can fully metabolize.” I continued, “Ah...[read on]
About Good Riddance, from the publisher:
The delightful new romantic comedy from Elinor Lipman, in which one woman’s trash becomes another woman’s treasure, with deliriously entertaining results.

Daphne Maritch doesn't quite know what to make of the heavily annotated high school yearbook she inherits from her mother, who held this relic dear. Too dear. The late June Winter Maritch was the teacher to whom the class of '68 had dedicated its yearbook, and in turn she went on to attend every reunion, scribbling notes and observations after each one—not always charitably—and noting who overstepped boundaries of many kinds.

In a fit of decluttering (the yearbook did not, Daphne concluded, "spark joy"), she discards it when she moves to a small New York City apartment. But when it's found in the recycling bin by a busybody neighbor/documentary filmmaker, the yearbook's mysteries—not to mention her own family's—take on a whole new urgency, and Daphne finds herself entangled in a series of events both poignant and absurd.
Visit Elinor Lipman's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Family Man.

The Page 99 Test: I Can't Complain.

The Page 69 Test: Good Riddance.

Writers Read: Elinor Lipman.

--Marshal Zeringue