Good in Bed
Mood:  energetic
Topic: Books
In all my whining about needing a break, I have failed to mention the mini-break I took to read Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner. I thought I had familiarized myself pretty well with all the books in Sudie's bookcases, but last Wednesday I came across this attention-getting title and had to take it off the shelf. The fact that Sudie kept the book once she was done with it told me she thought it was pretty good, since she gives away books regularly. The quote on the front cover said it was the ultimate "beach book" which would generally cause me to put the book back down, but instead I flipped it over and saw the author's picture--about my age, great smile--and the picture of her dog, Wendell--a rat terrier that looks like Kaija but with hair. Turned out the book was about a Philadelphia journalist who finds out her ex-boyfriend has written a column about her, entitled "Loving a Larger Woman," in a major national women's magazine. And, that the book was Jennifer Weiner's first published novel and that it had been translated into fourteen different languages (now 15) and was an "international bestseller."

I was hooked immediately. The book could be considered Chick Lit, if you buy into that title, and I hadn't really read any chick lit before, unless Pam Houston's Cowboys Are My Weakness counts, and then I would be guilty of reading and rereading and rereading a single piece of chick lit. Plus, I have so little time for reading, that I generally read only books that have come to me with some major recommendation--they were a pulitzer prize winner or nominee, they won a national book award, or Gretchen, my mother-in-law bookseller-of-twenty-years and book-lover-extraordinaire, has sent it to me and said I must read it. I decided I deserved a little emotional and mental escape, however, and borrowed the book and began reading it that very night. (I ended up glued to the couch with the book in my hands until late into the night Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, so for all my whining, I really did get something of a mini-vacation.)

I'm so glad I brought this book home! At the beginning it was like reading an excellent journal or a very well written memoir--the main character, Cannie (Candace) Shapiro, was so well written and so realistic, it was hard to remember that the book was fiction. If I had girlfriends, I would want Cannie to be first among them. She's twenty-eight or -nine in the book, single, overweight, and trying to make her first screenplay sale when she's not writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer and submitting queries and stories to other magazines. There comes a point in the story when you begin to realize that Jennifer is veering away from her own life in creating Cannie's and that we are entering the "what if" portion of the book, but by then, I was so in love with Cannie that I went gladly along with the rest. It's something of a fairytale, if fairytales can include becoming pregnant unexpectedly and deciding to keep the baby even though the father is offering no support of any kind, and has a happy ending that Jennifer says she promised herself because she wasn't sure her own life would have a happy ending.

I'm behind the times in reading the book because Jennifer has since written and published two more and is probably in publication on her fourth. Check out Jennifer's website at www.jenniferweiner.com to learn more about this book, the novels that follow it, and the movies that they have spawned.

As for me, I'm glad I waited until after I read the book to visit her website because extreme jealousy may have kept me from being able to so fully absorb myself in the story. Jennifer is my cohort--born within months of me--and has definitely had the writing life I would have chosen for myself if only I could have CHOSEN rather than letting fear of rejection, fear of success, and fear of letting go of other avenues and ideas of myself keep me completely immobilized for whole decades. She's on a roll, and definitely someone to watch!