Hanging Up
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- 4,49 €
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- 4,49 €
Publisher Description
We’ve had MOMMY DEAREST about Joan Crawford; now Delia Ephron brings us Daddy Dearest in her witty, bittersweet first novel about love, death and the telephone, based on the Ephron sisters’ experiences dealing with the death of their alcoholic father.
Hanging Up is about the three Mozell sisters, Georgia, Eve and Maddy. Georgia, the eldest, is a super-successful tough career woman, the editor of a magazine named after her. Eve, the middle sister, is just an ordinary mum. Maddy the youngest is a ditsy irresponsible soap opera star. Their father is dying. He is an alcoholic and has Alzheimers known as The Dwindles. The mother ran off with their biology teacher years ago. The father is in a home and threatening to marry one of the other inmates. He worships Georgia and talks about her endlessly which drives the other two mad since Georgia never does anything for him. He drives them all mad by telephoning them incessantly and they in turn have to phone each other to find out what he’s told whom. He plays them off against each other. And in the middle, keeping the whole thing going, shouldering most of the burderns, is Eve – the middle child.
About the author
Born in Los Angeles in 1944, Delia Ephron is the 2nd child of Henry and Phoebe Ephron, legendary Hollywood screenwriters (Carousel, Funny Face) and the younger sister of Nora Ephron who wrote the bestseller Heartburn (later made into a film with Jack Nicholson & Meryl Streep) about her divorce from Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. Delia was associate producer on Nora’s film SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE (highest grossing pic of 1993). Delia is author of several non-fiction & children’s books. She is currently working on another film with Nora.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The telephone plays an integral part in screenwriter and nonfiction author Ephron's (How to Eat Like a Child) humorous, if somewhat uncomfortable, look at the senility and death of a parent. Narrator Eve Mozell loves to chat on the phone, playing out nearly all of her relationships by talking into a plastic mouthpiece. Now 44 but still in the role of the unremarkable, overcompensating middle daughter, Eve finds the care of her elderly, alcoholic father foisted upon her by her sisters Georgia, an overbearing magazine editor, and Madeline, a dippy soap opera actress. With little support from either her work-absorbed husband, a public radio commentator, or her teenaged son, Eve struggles to understand the Mozell family neuroses. Flashbacks highlight her parents' scotch-soaked divorce, her mother's subsequent abandonment of the family and her father's descent into alcoholism and general obnoxiousness. Appropriately, a telephone relationship with a stranger helps Eve come to terms with the simultaneous love and disgust she feels for her father. All the phone talk makes the narrative dialogue-heavy, and most of Ephron's characters are gratingly self-absorbed. However, Eve's wry humor and gentle tolerance for these eccentrics and the foibles of life leaven the proceedings nicely, rendering this a novel few readers will hang up on.
