Mon amie américaine
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
When two colleagues become close friends they believe their friendship will last forever, but when one of them suffers a devastating illness, the bond between them is stretched to a breaking point.
Two women are film industry colleagues and very close friends. Molly is a charismatic and dynamic Manhattan businesswoman until, at the age of forty, she has a brain aneurysm and falls into a month-long coma. Frightened and debilitated, she is a shadow of her former self.
Michèle, her Parisian friend, must grapple with these changes as she contemplates the nature of her relationship with a now-unrecognizable Molly. Is the bond the same when everything you once loved about a person has changed? What becomes of a friendship you once thought was unbreakable? Author Michèle Halberstadt explores the guilt that arises from these questions with grace and sensitivity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Mich le, a Parisian woman learns her close American friend has fallen into a coma in New York, she begins writing down her thoughts, addressing her ill friend directly: "Molly, I have to talk to you." With the diary format, Halberstadt creates intimacy and taps directly into the anxious state of mind of a person waiting for news that's well beyond her control. There's something girlish about the narrator, who describes her friend, a film executive (as is the narrator herself), in hyperbole: Molly is "the most sappily romantic girl I've ever met, my incorrigible opposite, whom I've always found so wonderfully unreasonable." At first it seems the narrator is writing around her guilt, perhaps because Molly lives a single life in New York, while Mich le is ensconced in banal domesticity with her husband and two young children in Paris. But as the pages unfold, and Molly's coma lingers, it becomes apparent that the narrator's anxiety isn't simply over her friend's health; she finds herself in a state of inaction in her own life. Unfortunately, the narrator's overblown descriptions of her friend make it hard to believe Molly is her own character, and not merely the narrator's projection. Still, there are interesting themes of friendship and guilt in this slim volume. Halberstadt's approach ultimately reveals that friendships are mirrors, and when bonds break, we have to reckon with sides of ourselves we may not like.
