Dating Big Bird
A Novel
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Ellen Franck isn't in love with Big Bird. After all, he's a big yellow Sesame Street character -- and she's an intelligent single woman with a fabulous job. On the other hand, Big Bird is looking like a better candidate for fatherhood every day: he's tall, affectionate, and steadily employed. And right now, for Ellen, thirty-five years old and dying to have a baby, almost any father will do.
In her hilarious and heartbreaking new novel, Laura Zigman, bestselling author of Animal Husbandry, explores what happens when the life we've chosen isn't that life we expected it to be. And at this point Ellen Franck is rethinking all her choices.
Mired in a relationship with a man who is better at brooding than breeding, sister to a woman who can't seem to stop having babies, and working under a boss who is about to have the baby shower of the decade, Ellen knows the path to motherhood is clear. All she has to do is leave her relationship, horrify her family, find an anonymous father, and become independently wealthy.
Piece of cake.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her bestselling first book, Animal Husbandry, Zigman took a wry look at the mating rituals of young urbanites. Here she uses the same ironic tone to address the rituals of reproduction and one woman's anxiety about deciding whether to become a parent. At 35, Ellen Franck is bored with her glamorous job as marketing director for a fashion designer; she wants to have a baby. But her boyfriend, Malcolm, has made it clear that he doesn't want to be the father. An older, once-celebrated author who now teaches more than he writes, Malcolm takes Prozac to combat the depression he's wrestled with since Ben, his son from his first marriage, died of leukemia at age seven. Ellen cares for Malcolm despite his emotional remoteness and diminished sex drive (a side effect of the antidepressants), but her one true love is her three-year-old niece, Nicole, aka the Pickle. With Malcolm unlikely to change his mind, Ellen is forced to examine her insemination options, at one point kicking around the idea of co-parenting a child with Big Bird: "Big Bird would be the ideal parent. He's warm. He's affectionate. He's had a stable job for as long as I can remember." Will Ellen and her new best friend, Amy, who shares her "Pregnancy Fantasy Disorder," opt for artificial insemination and single motherhood? Settle for partners who'd make good fathers but less than satisfying husbands? Kidnap their nieces? Zigman's funny, conversational style draws the reader into Ellen's quest. Although the excessively happy ending is too pat to fit in with the wry tone of the rest of the book, the absorbing train of events and amusing dialogue make this a lark of a read.
