The Distinguished Guest - Hardcover

Miller, Sue

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060176733 ISBN 13: 9780060176730

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1995

Synopsis

The Distinguished Guest chronicles the visit of an ailing woman to her son and his family. Lily Maynard is proud, chilly, difficult, and famous for writing, at age seventy-two, a memoir about the dissolution of her marriage years earlier and the spiritual and political crises that precipitated that rift. Now, stricken with Parkinson's disease, Lily must cope with her fading powers as well as with disturbing memories of the events that estranged her from her children and ended her marriage. Her extended stay with her architect son, Alan Maynard, while she awaits relocation to a retirement community, sets the stage for conflicts, reflection, and new understanding. The visit raises questions for Alan about his relation to his mother and to his past, about the choices he has made in his own life, about the nature of love, disappointment, and grief.
The story moves between Lily and Alan and among others - Alan's loving, wholly grounded French wife Gaby, their two remarkable college-aged sons, a troubled journalist writing a profile of Lily, an African-American graduate student working on a thesis that connects to Lily's history in the early days of the civil rights movement. Pieces of the profile, excerpts from intimate letters and from both Lily's memoir and her fiction, all form part of the rich narrative as it moves toward its dramatic conclusion.

About this title

Review

An audacious and very moving book. -- New York Times

As in the work of Jane Austen... Sue Miller's is genuinely adult fiction. -- Chicago Tribune

Wonderful- rich, intelligent and moving... this is the fiction we need. -- Los Angeles Times

From the Back Cover

At the age of seventy-two, Lily Roberts suddenly became a national celebrity on writing her first book – a spiritual memoir. But her new-found fame was not well received by her children – her architect son Alan, and wayward daughter, Clary – who were profoundly disturbed by Lily’s intimate revelations about her married life. Ten years on, their resentment is still raw, and, when Lily, now ill and frail, comes to live with Alan and his own family, the bitter legacy of their very different memories threatens to upset the precarious balance of their lives ...

In the great North American tradition of Carol Shields, Anne Tyler and Jane Smiley, Sue Miller has created a potent portrait of family life, of the ties that bind people together, and the lies that pull them apart.

“A rare pleasure ... uncommonly gripping ... deeply felt ... remarkable.”
NEW YORK NEWSDAY

“Miller depicts her characters with grace and elegance. 'The Distinguished Guest' gathers momentum page by page, through a layering of detail. It is an audacious and subtly experimental book ... very moving.”
NEW YORK TIMES

“Full of striking revelations ... as canny as Miller can be about the rigors of family relationships, it’s the notion of storytelling itself that is most intriguing in this graceful book.”
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060176733
• ISBN 13: 9780060176730
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1