Rules for Saying GoodbyeRules for Saying Goodbye
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Book, 2007
Current format, Book, 2007, 1st ed, Available .Her years spent in the glamorous chill of an East Coast prep school introduce Katherine to all she needs to prepare for life in Manhattan, in a coming-of-age novel that has a feel for the delights and malaises of a generation.
Her years spent in the glamorous chill of an East Coast prep school introduce the heroine to all she needs to prepare for life in Manhattan, in a coming-of-age novel that has a feel for the delights and malaises of a generation.
Kate is having a hard time. Lucas, the journalist she moved to Rome to marry, seems to be breaking up with her; he is certain that when the time comes, she won't want to farm geese for foie gras in the Perigord with him. In actual fact, he doesn't want to feel responsible for making her happy.
"You were never responsible for that," she answers, confused. "Happiness simply happened between us."
In Kate's world, pleasure and melancholy are close neighbors, like the summer hats and lobster boilers squashed together in the tiny closet of her Manhattan apartment. Rules for Saying Goodbye follows Kate as she makes the unlikely migration from suburban California to the chilly rigor of a New England prep school, and then to Manhattan. Here she will enjoy a dissipated life of bartending and writing novels, falling in love with the wrong boys, and discussing these boys while smoking borrowed cigarettes on the sofa with her best friend, Clarissa. She budgets for fourteen-dollar cocktails, but not for groceries. Her devotedly neurotic mother is desperate for Kate to marry someone, anyone, so she can be sure that someone else will love her daughter after she dies. But Kate has other ideas.
“Kath is curious,” observes her younger brother, Ethan, not without anxiety. She is thirteen; already everyone can see she’s got her eye on bigger things than provincial Fresno can offer. Years in the glamorous chill of an East Coast prep school will introduce her to a razor-sharp sense of social distinction, cocaine “so good it’s pink,” and an indispensable best friend—all that she needs to prepare for life in Manhattan. There will be fourteen-dollar cocktails but no money for groceries; unsuitable men of enormous charm, and unsuitable jobs of no charm at all; and a wistful yearning for a transformation from someone of promise into someone of genius.
In this deliciously witty and affecting debut novel, fiction winks at real life: Katherine Taylor is its muddled heroine, and also its author. Written in the tradition of Curtis Sittenfeld and Melissa Bank, with the gorgeous hues of a pile of Gatsby’s shirts, Rules for Saying Goodbye is a bittersweet yet comic coming-of-age tale that has an unerring feel for the delights and malaises of a generation.
Her years spent in the glamorous chill of an East Coast prep school introduce the heroine to all she needs to prepare for life in Manhattan, in a coming-of-age novel that has a feel for the delights and malaises of a generation.
Kate is having a hard time. Lucas, the journalist she moved to Rome to marry, seems to be breaking up with her; he is certain that when the time comes, she won't want to farm geese for foie gras in the Perigord with him. In actual fact, he doesn't want to feel responsible for making her happy.
"You were never responsible for that," she answers, confused. "Happiness simply happened between us."
In Kate's world, pleasure and melancholy are close neighbors, like the summer hats and lobster boilers squashed together in the tiny closet of her Manhattan apartment. Rules for Saying Goodbye follows Kate as she makes the unlikely migration from suburban California to the chilly rigor of a New England prep school, and then to Manhattan. Here she will enjoy a dissipated life of bartending and writing novels, falling in love with the wrong boys, and discussing these boys while smoking borrowed cigarettes on the sofa with her best friend, Clarissa. She budgets for fourteen-dollar cocktails, but not for groceries. Her devotedly neurotic mother is desperate for Kate to marry someone, anyone, so she can be sure that someone else will love her daughter after she dies. But Kate has other ideas.
“Kath is curious,” observes her younger brother, Ethan, not without anxiety. She is thirteen; already everyone can see she’s got her eye on bigger things than provincial Fresno can offer. Years in the glamorous chill of an East Coast prep school will introduce her to a razor-sharp sense of social distinction, cocaine “so good it’s pink,” and an indispensable best friend—all that she needs to prepare for life in Manhattan. There will be fourteen-dollar cocktails but no money for groceries; unsuitable men of enormous charm, and unsuitable jobs of no charm at all; and a wistful yearning for a transformation from someone of promise into someone of genius.
In this deliciously witty and affecting debut novel, fiction winks at real life: Katherine Taylor is its muddled heroine, and also its author. Written in the tradition of Curtis Sittenfeld and Melissa Bank, with the gorgeous hues of a pile of Gatsby’s shirts, Rules for Saying Goodbye is a bittersweet yet comic coming-of-age tale that has an unerring feel for the delights and malaises of a generation.
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- New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
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