The Beginner's Book of Dreams: A Novel

Elizabeth Benedict

gush 2013 · Open Road Media

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This celebrated coming-of-age novel moves from Manhattan during the early days of Mad Men to the swinging, chaotic 1970s: A sensitive girl burdened with her mother’s drinking and long string of husbands becomes a special young woman when her best friend’s family opens her eyes to art
Esme Singer is a resilient girl from Los Angeles, new to Manhattan, who takes better care of her beautiful, alcoholic mother than her mother does of her. A former fashion model and extra in the movies, her mother attracts a series of husbands and boyfriends as Esme watches in fascination and sometimes horror. Esme’s father comes and goes, forever riding the wave of the latest get-rich-quick scheme. As Esme becomes a teenager, she turns to her friend Leah’s cultured, exotic family for inspiration and solace—especially Leah’s father, a well-known photographer who encourages Esme to cultivate her gifts. Might art—and a favorite teacher—become the answer to some of her troubles?
TheBeginner’s Book of Dreams is an insightful, sophisticated, sometimes wickedly funny, always sharp-eyed portrayal of a young woman inventing and discovering her own independent spirit. 

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DIVDIVElizabeth Benedict is a novelist, essayist, editor, and creative writing teacher. Her novels include the bestseller Almost, the National Book Award finalist Slow Dancing, and her most recent, The Practice of Deceit, which the Boston Globe called “a wickedly funny literary suspense novel.” In the Chicago Tribune, Anne Tyler praised her second novel, The Beginner’s Book of Dreams, for “the world it spreads before us,” which is “complex, fascinating, bewildering, sometimes morbidly funny, always unlaid with pain. The marvel is that such a sad book could be such a joy to read.” Benedict’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the Rumpus, Esquire, Allure, Harper’s Bazaar, Salmagundi, and Dædalus. She is the editor of two anthologies: Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, and the New York Times bestseller What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most./divDIV
Benedict has taught creative writing at Princeton, Columbia, Swarthmore, Massachussets Institute of Technology, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She teaches every summer at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore, and works year round as a writing coach and editor.  Learn more about Benedict and her work at elizabethbenedict.com and DontSweatTheEssay.com./div/div