Synopses & Reviews
When tall, blond, and beautiful Ellen Baxter enters the Paris Ritz the day before Princess Diana dies, shes mistaken for Diana by the paparazzi. The next morning, as Ellens older, Nobel-laureate husband attends a physics conference, she goes to the site of the fatal crash and finds an uncharacteristic photograph of Diana. Surprised by how deeply the death has affected her, Ellen pockets the photo. As she hears Dianas voice in her head and begins to understand the parallels between their lives, she tracks down the person who took the photograph, hoping that this man who deals in surfaces can penetrate her beauty, as he did Dianas, and help her love the woman inside.
Elizabeth Dewberrys complex, surprising novel uses string theory to weave together two womens lives and explore a culture that celebrates women for their beautythen exacts a terrible toll.
Review
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
HIS LOVELY WIFE"Dewberry . . . departs from the expected and ordinary as she gives achingly eloquent voice to a world of women whose stories often go untold: those who feel inevitably defined by the powerful men in their lives and recognize this with growing despair. With the beauty of language and nuance of gestures, she captures the unspoken yet profoundest truths between husband and wife. I predict His Lovely Wife will find a huge audience and grab those lucky readers by the heart.”--Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
Review
PRAISE FOR HIS LOVELY WIFE
"His Lovely Wife is told in understated yet succinctly lovely language. By delving deeply into Ellens life, Dewberry reveals the challenges many women face as they look for a meaningful place in their relationships and the world."USA TODAY
"For women who still believe that beauty will buy them a famous husband and a fabulous life, this is a poignant cautionary tale." THE BOSTON GLOBE
Synopsis
HIS LOVELY WIFE is the story of Ellen Baxter, a beautiful woman who, to her surprise-because she was not a Princess Diana fanatic-finds that Diana's death affects her so deeply that it triggers an identity crisis. She's staying at the Paris Ritz on the weekend Diana died because her much-older husband, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, is attending a professional meeting there, and after the crash, she begins to realize that her life parallels Diana's in more ways than she has previously articulated, even to herself, the most important being that almost everything in her life is what it is because of who she married. As she begins to ask some of the same questions about the relationships between passion and compassion, connection and independence that Diana, the ultimate lovely wife, was asking in her last years, she also pursues an attraction to a member of the paparazzi who was in pursuit of Diana when she died. And as she tries to tell her story, to listen to her own voice, she begins to hear Diana's voice as well, and Diana-or her ghost or, perhaps, my character's imaginative re-creation of her-becomes a major character in the book. Like Diana's, Ellen's is a story about what it's like to be a beautiful-but-not-quite-beautiful-enough woman (because she finds it impossible to feel beautiful enough) who loves an emotionally unavailable man and tries, perhaps too late, to create an identity for herself in terms other than those her marriage and the culture have provided for her.
About the Author
Elizabeth Dewberry has written three previous novels, including Sacrament of Lies. Her plays have been produced in a variety of venues. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with her husband, Robert Olen Butler.