Synopses & Reviews
Lissy Jablonski was fifteen during the summer of 1985. That was the summer her father, a soft-spoken, seemingly passionless gynecologist, up and left her mother for a redheaded bank teller. The same summer Lissy and her mother disappeared from their quiet New Hampshire lives to have an adventure of their own amid a cast of unlikely characters, including a Valium-addicted ex-debutante and a suspected mobster. The summer the reliably comforting "girl talks" with her mother began to reveal startling secrets. It was also the summer that Lissy's mother would ever after refer to as "the summer that never happened."
Now an almost-thirty-years-old advertising executive in Manhattan, faced with her father's imminent death and newly pregnant by her married ex-lover, an unmoored Lissy finds herself looking back across the years. Contending with her affections for an old boyfriend and his doomed marriage to a Korean stripper named Kitty Hawk, as well as the tangible legacies of that unmentionable summer with her mother, she realizes that she has become more like her mother than she ever could have imagined.
In her debut novel, acclaimed short-story writer and poet Julianna Baggott has woven a precise, smartly comic, and compassionate tale of discovery and desire. With a lyrical sensibility, Baggott reminds us -- through the witty and unsparingly realistic voice of her narrator, Lissy -- of the pleasures and sorrows that can come from the most unreasonable realities of the heart.
Review
"Girl Talk is a wonderful story. I was hooked with the very first sentence and yet was never actually sure where the story would lead. What I was always certain of was that I was in capable hands. The subtle twists and turns are remarkable and the characters, especially the mother, are vivid and memorable. This is the work of a very talented writer. It was a pleasure to read." Jill McCorkle, author of Carolina Moon and Crash Diet
Review
"I couldn't put this book down. Girl Talk's hilarious, relentless truths are well-served by its author's tough lyricism. Baggott trains a stern and tender eye onto our cultural markers, using them to signpost her lively trek toward the revelations of love -- lost, rediscovered, and most satisfying of all, unconditional." Carol Dawson, author of The Mother-in-Law Diaries
Review
"For Julianna Baggott, cosmic irony is always in the details, the absurd gap between self-knowledge and behavioral excess....The title misleadingly suggests that this novel will have a good-natured, gossipy tone, but Baggott's brand of witty psychological observation is dark and corrosive. The serious revelations here, though plentiful, aren't Baggott's true concern; Girl Talk is best appreciated as a sporadically funny string of satirical vignettes....Baggott's humor can be strained and sometimes repetitive, but she has a knack for finding the oxymoronic in any situation." Elizabeth Judd, The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
Lissy Jablonski was fifteen during the summer of 1985. That was the summer her father, a soft-spoken, seemingly passionless gynecologist, up and left her mother for a redheaded bank teller. The same summer Lissy and her mother disappeared from their quiet New Hampshire lives to have an adventure of their own amid a cast of unlikely characters, including a Valium-addicted ex-debutante and a suspected mobster. The summer the reliably comforting "girl talks" with her mother began to reveal startling secrets. It was also the summer that Lissy's mother would ever after refer to as "the summer that never happened."
Now an almost-thirty-years-old advertising executive in Manhattan, faced with her father's imminent death and newly pregnant by her married ex-lover, an unmoored Lissy finds herself looking back across the years. Contending with her affections for an old boyfriend and his doomed marriage to a Korean stripper named Kitty Hawk, as well as the tangible legacies of that unmentionable summer with her mother, she realizes that she has become more like her mother than she ever could have imagined.
In her debut novel, acclaimed short-story writer and poet Julianna Baggott has woven a precise, smartly comic, and compassionate tale of discovery and desire. With a lyrical sensibility, Baggott reminds us -- through the witty and unsparingly realistic voice of her narrator, Lissy -- of the pleasures and sorrows that can come from the most unreasonable realities of the heart.
About the Author
JULIANNA BAGGOTT has published dozens of short stories and poems in such magazines as
The Southern Review, Chelsea, Poetry, and
Best American Poetry 2000. A recipient of fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference, she won the 1998 Eyster Prize for short fiction.
She is the author of a forthcoming book of poems,
This Country of Mothers.
Girl Talk is her first novel and foreign rights have already been sold in six countries. She lives in Newark, Delaware, with her husband, poet David G.W. Scott, and their three children.