All About Lulu
A Novel
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A “wickedly funny and sublimely moving” debut from the New York Times–bestselling author of This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! (Caroline Leavitt, author of Cruel Beautiful World)
A quirky coming-of-age novel about a gawky vegetarian in an off-the-wall bodybuilding family, who develops an inconvenient obsession with his new stepsister . . .
Weakness has always been a concern for William Miller: growing up vegetarian in a family of competitive bodybuilders will do that to a person. But William’s life is turned upside down with the death of his mother and the arrival of both a new stepmother and stepsister—Lulu. At once they are thick as thieves, but years later, something changes, and William watches his life shift into tumult and despair.
Once Lulu departs for college, Will goes into the world to find himself, discovering Western philosophy, a cruel dating world, enduring friendship, and, ultimately, his true calling. Emboldened by his turn as a late-night radio personality, Will rescues himself from the self-image of weakness he’d long wished to escape. This debut novel explores the fundamental difference between where we come from—and the endless possibilities of where we may go.
A funny, moving, and painfully honest debut, this 10th anniversary edition includes a new author’s introduction and a foreword by New York Times–bestselling author J. Ryan Stadal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Evison's debut of love and loss, growing up, throwing up and moving on is a stunner. William Miller Jr. is a scrawny loner whose mother dies of cancer when he is seven years old, leaving him an awkward vegetarian with an ominously macho father and idiot twin brothers in mid-1970s Santa Monica. William's father, Big Bill, remarries a grief counselor named Willow, and Will spends the following decades in love with Louisa (Lulu, as she prefers to be called), his new stepsister. They are close throughout adolescence, but after a summer at cheerleading camp, Lulu returns home distant and hostile, leaving Will to pine for her in solitary desperation. Will finally appears to be on the path to normalcy in the early 1990s when he lucks into a radio talk-show hosting gig, but the stroke of good fortune is short-lived, as he discovers things about Lulu he'd rather not know. Evison provides readers a viciously funny and deeply felt portrayal of a blended family and one man's thwarted longing.
