Everything You Know - Softcover

Heller, Zoe

3.23

1,115 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743411951 ISBN 13: 9780743411950

Publisher: ibooks Inc, 2001

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Willy Muller is an embittered writer of celebrity bios and an equal-opportunity misanthrope. At fifty, he has survived imprisonment for murdering his wife, years of venomous hate mail from the British public and, most recently, the suicide of his daughter Sadie. Willy needs a break, but he's not going to get it. While recuperating from a heart attack in a Mexican resort with his magnificently silly girlfriend Penny and his vodka-drenched friend Harry, Willy finds himself drawn into a troubling confrontation with the past. As he becomes engrossed in Sadie's tragic diaries, he reluctantly considers his chaotic family history and the notion that "only when you die do you run out of chances to be good." With her scathing wit and brilliant ear for dialogue, Zoe Heller has created a darkly humorous story of love and loathing, sex and death, and filial relations gone horribly awry. Acidly funny and deeply affecting, "Everything You Know" marks the debut of a brilliant and immensely stylish young writer.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Michiko Kakutani "The New York Times" Zoe Heller has managed to turn this unsavory curmudgeon into the unlikely hero of a tale of rebirth and redemption....She effortlessly conjures up the disparate worlds Willy has traversed in his peripatetic career -- bohemian London in the seventies and hedonistic Hollywood in the nineties....What is striking about Willy's story is that Heller not only manages to make this selfish, piggy man understandable -- and by the end of the book sympathetic -- but that she has also succeeded in creating a narrative that seamlessly blends the sarcastic and the sincere, the comic and the tragic. Her journalistic eye for the telling detail, her pitch-perfect ear for the lunacies of contemporary speech, her knack for capturing the subtext of hope and memory and regret that informs so many familial exchanges -- all combine to make a stylish and spirited debut....As affecting as it is amusing.

About the Author:

Zo� Heller was born and educated in Britain and has been a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and a staff member at The New Yorker. She has written for The New York Times, Vogue, Esquire, the London Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books.

She lives in New York and Pennsylvania.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.