Nothing to Fall Back On
The Life and Times of a Perpetual Optimist
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Betsy Carter seemed to have it all: a gorgeous husband with Paul Newman eyes, a thriving career as a journalist at Newsweek and Esquire, and invites to the hottest parties in the best city in the world. Carter was the ultimate "New York woman," and so it was no wonder that she founded a magazine by that name.
But in her early thirties, her luck turned toxic: a fire, illness, divorce, a devastating cab accident, unspeakably bad boyfriends. Carter's life became so grim that her therapist suggested she have an exorcism; a tarot card reader burst into tears as she laid Carter's life out on the table.
This moving story, set against the gossipy and often hilarious world of magazine publishing in the go-go eighties, reveals what it was like for one woman to be stripped bare, wander the wreckage, and come back with her head and renovations intact.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her first book, Carter, the founding editor of New York Woman and current editor of My Generation, offers a refreshingly upbeat chronicle that covers the traditional memoir fare of life after divorce, surviving breast cancer and recovering from a disfiguring accident and more. After fulfilling her childhood wish to be "ajournalistinnewyork" and rising to a senior position at Esquire, Carter began her descent into what she calls "The Dark Years." "I'd lost my teeth, my ability to bear children, my husband, my house, and everything in it. Stripped bare again and again. If this were a movie, I'd skip to the end and pray for a happy ending. But this was my life, and there was no easy fast forward." Ultimately, the list of woes includes her mother's inoperable brain tumor and the demise of New York Woman. Carter alternates the story of her adult traumas with recollections of coming of age in the 1950s, the daughter of refugees from Hitler's Germany. Of all her losses, Carter writes most poetically about confronting the reality of aging, ailing parents. At the end of a visit to her recently diagnosed mother once a strong, pragmatic woman who supported the family Carter remembers, "she came over to me and pressed a brown paper bag into my hand... I ate the sandwich slowly, knowing that this was the beginning of our saying good-bye." Thankfully, Carter's style is mostly breezier, and her engaging account of her triumph over adversity (to a comparatively happy ending) should gratify many readers.
