"Yglesias's grasp of character is exhilarating -- clear, bold
and unflinchingly comic." --Newsweek
These days the news is full of reports about the graying
of America, yet it's rare that old people appear in contemporary fiction
except as stock characters -- the indulgent grandmother, the wicked
witch. In her first novel in a dozen years, the acclaimed author of
How She Died and Sweetsir gives us four grand old ladies, sisters, each
unique and indelibly real, in a poignant and very funny story about
the last American taboos, old age and dying.
As the novel opens, Jenny, the youngest at eighty, has flown down to
Miami -- that gaudy, pastel-hued haven of the elderly -- to look after
her two failing oldest sisters: Eva, ninety-five, always the family
mainstay, and Naomi, ninety, who is riddled with cancer but still has
her tart tongue and her jet-black hair too, straight out of the bottle,
but no head for the hard decisions facing Eva and Naomi. An energetic
eighty-five, Flora spends her time dating ("He's mad about me,
I only hope he can get it up!") and making the rounds of the retirement
homes with her standup routine, the Sandra Bernhard of the senior set.
The Girls gives us these four full-if-wrinkled fleshed
women with all their complaints and foibles, their self-absorption and
downright orneriness, their unquenchable humor and immense, immense
courage. Aches and pains, wrinkles and hearing aids, wheelchairs and
walkers -- out of these, and out of the human spirit in its aging body,
Helen Yglesias has fashioned a novel that moves us and opens our eyes
and makes us laugh out loud.
"The audience for this book is anyone
who is watching people they love grow old." -- Publisher's Weekly
"The Girls" is a tough-minded,
quietly affecting portrait of four women--not hags, not crones, but
ordinary Jewish American ladies--facing the end of life with a courageous
blend of defiance and resignation." -- Los Angeles Times
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Helen Yglesias is the author of
five novels and several works of nonfiction. A former literary
editor of the Nation, she has written for the New Yorker,
the New York Times Books Review, the Los Angeles Times, and
Harper's, among many other publications. Yglesias has been
uniformly praised by reviewers of her previous novels for
her unerring sense of character her elegance, delicacy, and
humor, her consummate craftsmanship, and her incomparable
ear for dialogue.
She has lectured and taught widely, and currently serves
on the board of THEA (The Home for Elder Artists), a pioneering
project to establish a nonprofit senior residence where
artists of all kinds can continue to flourish in their later
years. She lives in Maine and New York City.
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