All We Ever Wanted Was Everything
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3.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A smart, comic page-turner “executed with nerve and wit” (The New York Times Book Review) following a Silicon Valley family in free fall over the course of one eventful summer, from the New York Times bestselling author of Watch Me Disappear
“Addictive . . . [an] unapologetically soapy mix of teen sex, quarter-life crises, food porn and mean-girl politics . . . a summery, old-fashioned page-turner.”—Salon
When Paul Miller’s pharmaceutical company goes public, making his family IPO millionaires, his wife, Janice, is sure this is the windfall she’s been waiting years for—until she learns, via messengered letter, that her husband is divorcing her (for her tennis partner!) and cutting her out of the new fortune. Meanwhile, four hundred miles south in Los Angeles, the Millers’ older daughter, Margaret, has been dumped by her newly famous actor boyfriend and left in the lurch by an investor who promised to revive her fledgling post-feminist magazine, Snatch. Sliding toward bankruptcy and dogged by creditors, she flees for home where her younger sister Lizzie, 14, is struggling with problems of her own. Formerly chubby, Lizzie has been enjoying her newfound popularity until some bathroom graffiti alerts her to the fact that she’s become the school slut.
The three Miller women retreat behind the walls of their Georgian colonial to wage battle with divorce lawyers, debt collectors, drug-dealing pool boys, mean girls, country club ladies, evangelical neighbors, their own demons, and each other, and in the process, they become achingly sympathetic characters we can’t help but root for, even as the world they live in epitomizes everything wrong with the American Dream.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Brown's withering Silicon Valley satire, a family wakes up on a June day to realize that patriarch Paul's company has hit the big time with a phenomenal IPO. But instead of rejoicing about being newly rich, the family's three women each find themselves in the throes of a major crisis. Paul has fled with his new amour, who happens to be wife Janice's tennis partner. Desperate housewife Janice discovers the soothing power of the pool boy's drug stash and sinks into addiction and denial. Meanwhile, 20-something daughter Margaret learns the price of living a Hollywood lifestyle on an artsy hipster's budget "gargantuan credit card debt. Finally, 14-year-old Lizzie wades deeper and deeper into a sea of adolescent trouble without an adult to confide in. From the ashes of their California dreams, the three must learn to talk to each other instead of past each other, and build a new, slightly more realistic existence "but not without doses of revenge and hilarity. Brown's hip narrative reads like a sharp, contemporary twist on The Corrections.
Customer Reviews
Way too depressing
Maybe some people enjoy reading books like this because it makes them feel better about their own lives, but I just found this slow and exhausting. The book starts with each of the three main characters being in a bad place … and for the rest of the book, their lives just keep individually spiraling downwards. I kept waiting in vain for something good to happen to at least one of them. Finally on the last page there is a glimmer of hope that things might get better for a couple of them… but nothing concrete. Even though it was well written in a couple of parts, this book was definitely not my thing.