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Zusatztext USA Today Funny! poignant....There is a heartfelt quality to all of McCauley's work that is hard to forget. Informationen zum Autor StephenMcCauleyis the author ofAlternatives to Sex,True Enough,The Man of the House,The Easy Way Out,My Ex-Life, andThe Object of My Affection, which was adapted into a film starring JenniferAnistonand Paul Rudd.He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Visit his website atStephenMcCauley.com. Klappentext From the author of The Object of My Affection comes a warm and witty family drama about love and lust, trust and betrayal, commitment and denial.Jane Cody keeps lists. After all, how else would she keep track of her life?her job producing a Boston TV show; her amiable but frankly dull second husband; and her precocious six-year-old son who "doesn't do small talk" but loves to bake. And as if that weren't enough she has an acid-tongued mother-in-law living in her barn, an arthritic malamute lodger to walk, and a dangerously seductive ex-husband on the scene. In New York, Desmond Sullivan is fretting that his five-year relationship with smart, sweet Russell is too monogamous and settled. Perhaps a spell as writer-in-residence at Deerforth College will cure that, and also allow him to finish his biography of one of the 'sixties greatest forgotten mediocrities, torch singer Pauline Anderton? When Jane and Desmond meet in Boston, they embark on a TV documentary about the elusive Anderton, which is to take them on a journey of self-discovery in which they learn as much about their own secrets and lies than they ever wanted to know. Chapter One: Things to Do In the course of one week, Anderton went from unknown lounge singer to Decca recording artist. "One morning me and the kids are having coffee," she told Look magazine in 1961, "and a record producer calls and says he wants to cut a demo. That phone call gave me a whole new life, even though nothing changed." From Cry Me a River: The Lives of Pauline Anderton by Desmond Sullivan 1. Jane Cody kept lists -- Things To Do, Things To Buy, Bills To Pay, Appointments To Keep -- but because she knew they provided the kind of irrefutable paper trail that almost always got people into trouble at tawdry junctures in their lives, her lists weren't the literal truth. Some inaccuracies were alibis in case the reminders fell into the wrong hands, while others were there to mislead the people she practically forced to read them. It was a simple system that caused her problems only when she confused the code and started missing dental appointments and showing up at restaurants for imaginary lunches, both of which had happened in the past three weeks. Obviously, she'd been working too hard, unless maybe she hadn't been working enough. She was sitting at her desk poring over tomorrow's notes to herself to stave off the anxiety attack she could feel brewing in the back of her brain, building in strength like one of the many tropical storms currently approaching adulthood somewhere in the South Atlantic. (The topic of a recent doom-laden conversation on the show she produced: Another Storm of the Century?) It had been a bad morning -- an argument with her son and a volleyball game of passive-aggressive selflessness with her husband -- and then the chocolates one of her co-workers had brought in proved disappointing and the carefully arranged plans for this afternoon's taping of the show had started to unravel. At moments like these, she wished she hadn't tried to impress her shrink by agreeing with him that tranquilizers and antidepressants were grossly overprescribed. She was tired of going out of her way to impress Dr. Berman. She was paying him $130 an hour, which ought to be enough to buy his approval, no matter what her opinions. It was one of those hot, irritating late-August days with the kind of filthy air you wanted to push out ...
