About this ebook
This “luminous, meditative novel on the boundaries between childhood, adulthood, and old age” follows one day in the lives of three generations of women (Entertainment Weekly).
Like Normal People charts a family constellation that revolves around an off-kilter center: Lena is forty-eight years old, but mentally locked in childhood. Moving deftly between present and past, the novel follows Lena’s day-long escape from her residential home with her troubled twelve-year-old niece. While this odd couple takes refuge on a honky-tonk southern California beach, Lena’s widowed mother, Ella, goes in search of them. In the process, Ella relives her own life’s dreams and disappointments: her marriage to a sweet, loving shoe salesman; her discovery of Lena’s disability; and her aching attempts to give her daughter a “normal” childhood. For so long, Lena has been the focus of Ella’s world—but now, she must contemplate the prospect of letting her daughter go.
Covering three entire lifetimes in the course of one day, this powerful, emotional story from the author of Refund, a National Book Award finalist, is “an uplifting and bittersweet testament to uncompromising love” (The New York Post).
Like Normal People charts a family constellation that revolves around an off-kilter center: Lena is forty-eight years old, but mentally locked in childhood. Moving deftly between present and past, the novel follows Lena’s day-long escape from her residential home with her troubled twelve-year-old niece. While this odd couple takes refuge on a honky-tonk southern California beach, Lena’s widowed mother, Ella, goes in search of them. In the process, Ella relives her own life’s dreams and disappointments: her marriage to a sweet, loving shoe salesman; her discovery of Lena’s disability; and her aching attempts to give her daughter a “normal” childhood. For so long, Lena has been the focus of Ella’s world—but now, she must contemplate the prospect of letting her daughter go.
Covering three entire lifetimes in the course of one day, this powerful, emotional story from the author of Refund, a National Book Award finalist, is “an uplifting and bittersweet testament to uncompromising love” (The New York Post).
About the author
Karen E. Bender's novel excerpts have been published in the New Yorker, Granta, and Story magazines. The chapter "Eternal Love" was chosen by Annie Proulx to appear in The Best American Short Stories: 1997, and was read by Joanne Woodward to a sold-out crowd at Symphony Space in New York; the recording of that reading aired on NPR's Selected Shorts. Bender also received a prestigious Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award based on a draft of this novel. Bender's fiction has appeared in the Iowa Review and the Kenyon Review and has been reprinted in Pushcart Prize XVIII and other anthologies. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she lives in New York with her husband, the writer Robert Anthony Siegel, and their son.
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