The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating
A Novel
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
"Radziwill's delicious debut novel… is a poignant tale of love and loss."—Publishers Weekly
"One of the richest, most deeply satisfying stories I've read in a long time."—BookPage
"Carole Radziwill writes like a cross between Sophie Kinsella and Christopher Buckley. Cautiously romantic, unexpectedly moving, and funny!"—Susan Sarandon
The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating is Carole Radziwill's deliciously smart comedy about a famously widowed young New Yorker hell-bent on recapturing a kind of passionate love she never really had
Claire Byrne is a quirky and glamorous 34-year-old Manhattanite and the wife of a famous, slightly older man. Her husband, Charlie, is a renowned sexologist and writer. Equal parts Alfred Kinsey and Warren Beatty, Charlie is pompous yet charming, supportive yet unfaithful; he's a firm believer that sex and love can't coexist for long, and he does little to hide his affairs. Claire's life with Charlie is an always interesting if not deeply devoted one, until Charlie is struck dead one day on the sidewalk by a falling sculpture ... a Giacometti, no less!
Once a promising young writer, Claire had buried her ambitions to make room for Charlie's. After his death, she must reinvent herself. Over the course of a year, she sees a shrink (or two), visits an oracle, hires a "botanomanist," enjoys an erotic interlude (or ten), eats too little, drinks too much, dates a hockey player, dates a billionaire, dates an actor (not any actor either, but the handsome movie star every woman in the world fantasizes about dating). As she grieves for Charlie and searches for herself, she comes to realize that she has an opportunity to find something bigger than she had before—maybe even, possibly, love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Claire Byrne comes piteously undone after Charlie, her imperious husband and a best-selling sexologist, is beaned by a knockoff 190-pound bronze sculpture in reality star Radziwill's delicious debut novel, a return to the subject matter of her memoir, What Remains, which explored Radziwill's reaction to the early death of her husband. The death of Claire's middle-aged husband forces her, a 32-year-old, emotionally immature aspiring writer, to re-evaluate a life spent in Charlie's shadow. "You've never really been alone," best friend Ethan tells her. "You got married at twenty-two.... Before you could be a sun, you signed on to be a moon." Claire promptly falls for Holly-wood heartthrob Jack Huxley, whom Charlie was writing a book about, but discovers that Charlie's biggest critic, book reviewer Ben Hawthorne, might just be the one to repair her broken heart and dreams. Along this circuitous path to happiness, there will be 35 mostly gratuitous rules ("#19: Never kiss a man who will look better than you in the morning) and a sly nod to Radziwill's day job as one of the Real Housewives of New York. But beyond the camp and predictable, there is a poignant tale of loss and love. "Sex is one thing. Sex is easy.... The trouble is those other two: hope and its mean cousin, heartbreak," Claire finds.
