At age fifty, Pippa Lee seems perfectly content. The devoted wife of a successful publisher and proud mother of grown twins, a consummate hostess to the literati and an admired and trusted neighbor, her life seems to lack for nothing. But when she and her eighty-year-old husband move to a quiet retirement village, the routines and distractions that have upheld Pippa's flawless feminine persona begin to crumble away. And under the surface, her surprisingly gritty and adventurous past is beginning to break through.
When Pippa finds herself acting out strange yearnings in her sleep, she gradually allows the voice of her lost self to come through into her consciousness, recounting a wild and reckless youth full of experimentation and heartbreak, passion and guilt. We learn how she ran away from home to escape the manic-depression of her pill-popping mother, only to fall into drugs herself among the loose New York art crowd. Leaving a trail of broken hearts and messy affairs behind her, it is only when she meets the older Herb that she discovers her longing for security and resolves to steal him from his wife in order to settle down and create a family of her own.
Written with quirky humor, intelligence and compassion, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is a wise and acute portrait of the many lives behind a single name.
Rebecca Miller is the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and is married to Academy Award–winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis. She lives in New York City with their two sons. Her feature film, Personal Velocity, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and her latest movie, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, received rave reviews.
Bernadette Dunne has been honored to narrate the work of some of the finest fiction and nonfiction writers of our time, including Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Sandra Day O'Connor. The winner of more than a dozen Earphones Awards and a three-time Audie Award nominee, she has voiced countless bestsellers, including Memoirs of a Geisha, The Devil Wears Prada, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She studied at The Royal National Theater and lives in New York.