Pink Slip - Hardcover

Ciresi, Rita

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 038532362X ISBN 13: 9780385323628

Publisher: Delacorte Press, 1998

Synopsis

A novel about the inescapable bonds of family and personal history, Pink Slip asks the question, in love, what must we reveal about ourselves?

Twenty-five-year-old Lisa Diodetto needed a change. Her job editing holocaust memoirs for a prestigious New York publishing company barely paid the rent, and an ill-thought out affair with a married man had left her flattened by the wheels of romance. At the urging of her first cousin and lifelong best friend Dodie, she left New York for a job upstate in the editorial department of a big pharmaceutical company. It was a clean slate far from her working class upbringing in an Italian-American New Haven neighborhood, and she planned to make the most of it.

Enter Mr. Eben Strauss, Vice-President of Corporate Development. A man of careful composure, a restrained sense of humor, and impeccable manners. A man who certainly wouldn't appreciate Lisa's big mouth and hot temper. A man who would never dream of compromising his position or anyone else's with any kind of workplace impropriety. A man surprisingly attracted by--and attractive to--Lisa.

The relationship that ensues illustrates the very real dangers of falling in love-particularly falling in love with your boss, particularly falling in love with a boss who doesn't know the half of your personal history. Lisa is embarrassed to tell Strauss about her past--her crazy family, her wild escapades with Dodie--but she soon discovers that Strauss is keeping secrets, too. How both of them try to accept the truth about each other makes for a funny, sharp, and moving novel about the difficulties of intimacy and the imperfections of love.

About this title

Review

New York editorial jobs, especially entry-level ones, can be a drag. Lisa Diodetto, the twentysomething narrator of Rita Ciresi's Pink Slip, is well aware of this, having had her fill of dismal manuscripts and pitiful paychecks. So Lisa gives up on the supposed romance of publishing, ditching her job for a corporate position in a leafy suburb somewhere along the Hudson, where she edits things such as brochures and correspondences for Boorman Pharmaceuticals. The problem is that Lisa is a hot-blooded Italian American girl whose best friend is her gay cousin, Dodie. Even as she wants to shed their old ways--pot smoking and a shared habit of dating no-good men--she doesn't exactly try to integrate into corporate culture.

Lisa's skirts are on the too-short side, she uses office hours to work on a sex-filled novel about corporate life, and she starts dating someone in senior management. He, Eben Strauss, is Jewish and straight-laced--a foil to Lisa's naughty Catholic-girl persona. On a date to West Point, she notices that "Strauss wore a pair of tortoise shell prescription glasses that made me want to jump him. As he carefully inspected the foldout map of the grounds we picked up at the visitors' information center, I speculated whether he always took his glasses off before he moved in for the kill, or if he had even been so swept away he left them on through the entire act." Needless to say, Strauss wants to visit West Point's chapels while Lisa wants to view the cadets.

Lisa likes to think that she doesn't want to be the baby-hungry wife that her older, married sister has become. But the fact is that she craves a husband and a home and eventually a kid as much as her ordinary Italian relatives do. What makes Pink Slip appealing is the way in which Rita Ciresi shows how Lisa juggles her modern aspirations and Old World desires. It's a tricky tightrope to walk. --Katherine Alberg

From the Back Cover

"Wit and humor are the keys to this lively novel."
--Mademoiselle

"Pink Slip mixes lust, corporate shenanigans and the dangers of writing tell-all books. . . . Ciresi's humor has an edgy Nora Ephron quality; her heroine is flawed enough to be endearing."
--St. Petersburg Times

"This is Jane Austen in New York at the end of the 20th century. . . . Ciresi mixes the tragic and the comic aspects of love in hilarious fashion."
--Tampa Tribune-Times

"Ms. Ciresi's wonderful prose and generous heart work together pitch perfectly here to render what we all hope for: a good love story."
--Bret Lott, author of Jewel

About this edition

• Publisher: Delacorte Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 038532362X
• ISBN 13: 9780385323628
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368