Ever since her father broke her heart when she was nine, Julia Heimdahl has tried to be good company for bad men: a jovial drinking companion, an easygoing, witty non-complainer, one of the boys. Now a literary novelist in late middle age and late mid-career, she is at a moment of crisis, although she doesn’t know it yet. The novel takes place over the course of a weekend-long book festival at Baldwin College, which happens to be Julia’s alma mater, where she has come to promote her recently published memoir. She’s been placed on a panel with a fellow memoirist named Ellis Blackwell, a man so outrageously flirtatious and fawningly flattering, Julia is almost too disarmed to recognize how dangerous he is.
Disarmingly frank and utterly engaging ... Christensen concentrates her gimlet eye on bad men, the women who enable them, and an industry all too eager to gobble up and discard young women ... Christensen reveals the ways that sometimes the stories we tell about ourselves — in fiction or memoir — are only as convincing and sincere as our ability to move past them.
Christensen executes a ninja takedown of toxic literary hypocrisy and an evisceration of the endless damage wrought by misogyny and sexual predation and violence.
In probing misogyny’s legacy and the uneasy intimacies among women, Christensen delivers a bracing meditation on trust, aging, and the wreckage violent men leave in their wake.
