Hot Flashes
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- ¥1,600
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- ¥1,600
発行者による作品情報
New York Times Bestseller: This “landmark women’s novel” about female friendship and women’s lib is “something akin to Mary McCarthy’s The Group” (People).
Diana Sargeant is a menopausal anthropology professor whose hot flashes often produce insights into life, love, and what it means to be a woman. Diana belongs to a generation of A-list females: well-educated jet-setters who overcame their fear of flying in the fifties, became leftist protestors in the sixties, and were glamorous seductresses on birth control in the seventies. But in the eighties, they’re middle-aged matrons who are afraid of their own mortality and must come to terms with the fact that even though they obtained everything they desired, they’re still unfulfilled.
When Diana’s close friend Sukie Amram suffers a fatal brain hemorrhage, the professor rushes to Washington, DC, to mourn and commemorate the woman she so loved. There, she reunites with her lifelong pals: flashy magazine writer Joanne Ireland and divorced English teacher Elaine Cantor. The three soon discover Sukie’s journal, which details her battle with despair after her husband abandoned her for a younger lover. As they read through the details of Sukie’s postdivorce anguish, the friends revisit difficult moments in their own pasts and discover themselves anew.
Called “a feminist version of The Big Chill” by the Washington Post, Hot Flashes is an irreverent, witty, and emotionally engaging novel about four intelligent, trailblazing women that provides a compelling, honest look at female fears and desire during the late twentieth century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
They were Depression babiesmembers of the Silent Generation that found its voice in the protest movements of the '60s. Twenty years later, they can only protest the encroachments of middle-age. Elaine, once the "political conscience'' of their quartet, is now embittered and overweight. Joanne, gorgeous and trendy, is ``unfulfilled,'' while Diana, a professor of anthropology, has distanced herself from most emotional ties. Sukie, the first to knit them all together (in her novels as well as in life) has just become the first to die. She leaves them an interesting, if inadvertent legacy: a journal that describes the painful break-up of her 20-year marriage and three men (her former husband and two lovers), thus making this the only book in which a three-day mourning ritual is converted into an impromptu singles weekend. Diana, who sees herself as ``an authority on female rites of passage,'' is its narrator. Her rather heavy-handed insistence on the story's universality may lead readers to question just that. Unlike most women, those in Hot Flashes belong to a coterie that includes (as Diana often tells us) people like Shirley and Betty, Nora and Lois and Gloria. . . . The warmest current in this book stems from its understanding of friendship itself. 200,000 first printing; $200,000 ad/promo; BOMC alternate; author tour.