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Stuff I'm Reading

 *"The Good Mother," by Sue Miller. This is an extraordinary novel about a woman who makes a mistake. She is drunk on love in the first few months after her divorce, and she allows her tiny daughter to sleep in a bed with her while she (the mom) finishes having sex with her boyfriend.


People say that a good novel should make you worried; you should feel concerned about the narrator, and it's this concern that leads you to pick up the book again and again. Sue Miller knows how to be upsetting. Her debut novel--now called "iconic"--had a clear influence on Michelle Huneven, who wrote her own version of "The Good Mother" and called it "Blame."


*"Woo Hoo! You're Doing Great!" Sandra Boynton has outdone herself with this tale of a masochistic chicken who comes dangerously close to self-destruction. That's actually the plot of the picture book. Suspenseful and astonishing.


*"Everybody Knows," by Jordan Harper. In this "L.A. noir" novel, fixers try to assist depraved, powerful men. One character is clearly modeled on Jeffrey Epstein; another seems to be the wealthy gay donor Ed Buck, who is in jail for thirty years, because he injected men with meth and paved the way for two fatal overdose disasters.

A third character seems to be Lindsay Lohan.

This is a seedy thriller that made me see Hollywood in a new way. I think of the show "Glee," for example, and I try to imagine the kinds of demands the country makes with regard to celebrity children--and I feel a little bit nauseated.
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