She Is Me: A Novel - Hardcover

Schine, Cathleen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316786098 ISBN 13: 9780316786096

Publisher: Little, Brown, 2003

Synopsis

Greta finds her life turned upside down by the arrival of her grown daughter, Elizabeth, by the increasingly eccentric behavior of her widowed mother, and by unexpectedly falling in love with someone other than her devoted husband.

About this title

About the Author

Cathleen Schine is the author of five novels--Alice in Bed, To the Birdhouse, The Evolution of Jane, and the international bestsellers Rameau's Niece and The Love Letter. She divides her time between New York City and Los Angeles.

Reviews

Schine (The Love Letter; The Evolution of Jane) takes a refreshing and often very funny look at love, aging and loyalty in the complicated lives of three women in a tight-knit family. Assistant professor Elizabeth Bernard moves to Los Angeles with her live-in boyfriend, Brett, and their three-year-old son, Harry, after a paper she wrote on Madame Bovary ("The Way Madame Bovary Lives Now: Tragedy, Farce and Cliche in the Age of Ikea") catches the eye of a hotshot studio head, who hires her to write the screenplay for an updated version of Flaubert's classic. Also living in L.A. are her grandmother, Lotte, a sharp-talking sometime actress whose aging but still beautiful skin is now marred by a cancerous tumor, and her mother, Greta, a garden designer with a lackluster marriage and a recent diagnosis of colon cancer. Elizabeth quickly finds herself beleaguered by competing demands: her sick mother and grandmother, "now drifting just out of her reach, her grandmother toward death, her mother toward uncertainty"; her sweet, needy son; her husband Brett's insistence that she marry him; her problematic screenplay. Greta, meanwhile, develops a surprising crush on Daisy Peperino, the director with whom Elizabeth is collaborating, and Lotte tries to come to terms with her own imminent death. Schine deftly mixes humor and pathos as she explores these women's various challenges. Elizabeth, especially, grapples with adultery, passion and grief, like Flaubert's heroine, but this sweet novel has none of the French classic's darkness. Instead, it's clever, charming and even uplifting, as Elizabeth learns that love and family are "farcical only from the outside and tragic only when they ended" and that forgiveness is always possible.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Elizabeth Bernard is plucked from obscurity as an untenured New York professor to write the screenplay for a movie, "Mrs. B," that updates "Madame Bovary" to "the Age of Ikea." Once she's been lured to Los Angeles, she grows as restless as Flaubert's heroine, whose initials she shares: she rejects her patient boyfriend's repeated marriage proposals and longs for her boss, a bullying producer who nixes her scripts because they lack "cutting-edge banality." Schine writes with the speed and punch of a seasoned comic, conveying character in a single line of dialogue. But this sly novel is a silver cloud with a dark lining—both Elizabeth's mother and grandmother have cancer. Just when we've settled in for froth and sparkle, Schine ambushes us with feeling.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316786098
• ISBN 13: 9780316786096
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272