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Zusatztext ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE LIFE ROOM "Jill Bialosky pierces the heart here until the reader feels just exactly what it means to have it all—husband, children, success—and yet to be achingly alone, longing for passion, of the kind Anna Karenina sacrificed everything for. Through Bialosky’s elegant prose and tremendous talents as a storyteller, desire reverberates across the pages to meet the reader’s own."— MARTHA McPHEE Informationen zum Autor JILL BIALOSKY is the author of the acclaimed novel House Under Snow and two collections of poetry, The End of Desire and Subterranean. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker and O, The Oprah Magazine. She is an editor at W. W. Norton & Company and lives in New York City. Klappentext Eleanor Cahn, a professor of literature, wife of a preeminent surgeon, and devoted mother of two, is in Paris to present a paper on Anna Karenina. A chance encounter brings to the surface passions she has suppressed for years. As The Life Room unfolds, we learn the secrets of her erotic past: ethereal William, her high school boyfriend; her role as muse to troubled painter Adam; her marriage to loyal, steady Michael. On her return to New York, Eleanor's charged attraction to another man takes on a life of its own, threatening to destroy everything she has. Jill Bialosky has created a fresh, piercingly real heroine who must choose between responsibility and desire. Leseprobe 1 She had been born with different colored eyes. One blue and the other green. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she felt as if she were split down the center, divided, as if one part of her were competing with the other. She had heard that if a person has dissimilar eyes at birth, it is quite possible that the two eyes were subjected to different pressures within the womb. Tonight she felt as if her blue eye was telling her to go to Paris and her green eye was telling her not to go. She had just been invited to give a paper on Tolstoy at an international conference on world literature at the Sorbonne and, of course, she had to go; it was an honor, something she had long hoped for. She loved the exhilaration that followed after presenting a paper. She imagined herself walking through the Parisian city streets and sitting in cafés, hearing stimulating lectures by academics she admired. She imagined she’d find both the quiet time and the inspiration she needed to begin turning the paper she had written on Anna Karenina into a full-length study. The thought of going filled her with guilty pleasure. But she did not want to think about leaving her family behind. She could not bear being separated from them. She knew it was irrational, yet she often experienced feelings that on one level seemed irrational and on another felt perfectly reasonable. Now she was in bed, glad that Michael had drifted off. She hadn’t told him yet about Paris, not because she chose to keep secrets. She only wanted to keep her trip to herself for as long as possible, to revel in her accomplishment privately. She didn’t want her own thoughts to escape before she’d had a chance to digest them. Eleanor listened to the creaks in the wood, the bang of the radiator. The boys were sound asleep in the room across the hall from them, and Michael was breathing in lightly, making a whistling sound through his nose. Suddenly, Eleanor was so frightened by the thought of leaving them that she couldn’t move. She said to herself, It’s okay. Nothing is going to happen to the boys or Michael if you go away. They’ll be here waiting. Go see your boys. She rose from the bed and moved into the room where the boys slept and slipped in next to Noah, the youngest, and held him. She fell asleep again, and when she awoke it was dawn. She crept down the drafty hall, folded her body underneath the sheet in the bed next to her husband, and fell...
