My Life as a Villainess
Essays
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
New York Times bestselling
author Laura Lippman, a journalist for many years, collects here her recent
essays exploring motherhood as an older mom, her life as a reader, her
relationships with her parents, friendship, and other topics that will resonate
with a large audience. Her voice is wry
and relatable, her takes often surprising.
Meet the Woman Behind
the Books…
In this collection of new and previously published essays, New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman offers her
take on a woman's life across the decades. Her childhood and school years, her newspaper
career, her experiences as a novelist—Lippman finds universal touchstones in an
unusual life that has as many twists as her award-winning crime fiction.
Essays include:
· Men Explain
The Wire to Me
· Game of
Crones
· My Life as
a Villainess
· My Father’s
Bar
· The 31st Stocking
These candid essays offer long-time readers insight into the
experiences that helped Lippman become one of the most successful crime
novelists of her generation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Self-awareness, a knack for observation, and a dose of snark fuel the uneven but occasionally potent debut collection from Edgar Award winning crime novelist Lippman (The Lady in the Lake). As Lippman explains, "There is a sense of liberation in admitting to one's faults" and in fact she "had to stretch to earn the title" of villainess. The essays sometimes feel as though they could have gone deeper into their subject, but nuggets of insight show up consistently enough to compensate, as when she comments, "Our culture long ago made peace with the fragility of matrimony, but we still have high expectations for friendships." Lippman is at her best when confronting society's expectations of women, especially while discussing becoming a late-in-life mom. About menopause, she drily comments that it "doesn't make women want to die. It makes other people wish we would die, or at least disappear." Rightfully asking to be judged on her own terms, not on those of the women she cites as inevitable comparisons for a female essayist Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Susan Sontag Lippman contributes an appealingly candid voice to the literary conversation.
