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.
Zoë 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.