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Summary
Summary
"The Love Letter" was a beloved and bestselling novel, and "She Is Me" is a return to that winning form--a novel about women's friendships, love, and family.
Author Notes
Author Cathleen Schine was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1953. She received a BA from Barnard College in 1976. She is both a novelist and a freelance writer. Two of her novels, The Love Letters and Rameau's Niece, were made into movies. She has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and Family Circle. She currently lives in New York City.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Schine (The Love Letter; The Evolution of Jane) takes a refreshing and often very funny look at love, aging and loyalty in the complicated lives of three women in a tight-knit family. Assistant professor Elizabeth Bernard moves to Los Angeles with her live-in boyfriend, Brett, and their three-year-old son, Harry, after a paper she wrote on Madame Bovary ("The Way Madame Bovary Lives Now: Tragedy, Farce and Cliche in the Age of Ikea") catches the eye of a hotshot studio head, who hires her to write the screenplay for an updated version of Flaubert's classic. Also living in L.A. are her grandmother, Lotte, a sharp-talking sometime actress whose aging but still beautiful skin is now marred by a cancerous tumor, and her mother, Greta, a garden designer with a lackluster marriage and a recent diagnosis of colon cancer. Elizabeth quickly finds herself beleaguered by competing demands: her sick mother and grandmother, "now drifting just out of her reach, her grandmother toward death, her mother toward uncertainty"; her sweet, needy son; her husband Brett's insistence that she marry him; her problematic screenplay. Greta, meanwhile, develops a surprising crush on Daisy Peperino, the director with whom Elizabeth is collaborating, and Lotte tries to come to terms with her own imminent death. Schine deftly mixes humor and pathos as she explores these women's various challenges. Elizabeth, especially, grapples with adultery, passion and grief, like Flaubert's heroine, but this sweet novel has none of the French classic's darkness. Instead, it's clever, charming and even uplifting, as Elizabeth learns that love and family are "farcical only from the outside and tragic only when they ended" and that forgiveness is always possible. 6-city author tour. (Sept. 15) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Three generations of a close-knit family--mother, daughter, and granddaughter, each supporting the other selflessly but nevertheless facing her greatest challenge alone. Best known for The Love Letter (1995), which became a movie, Schine (The Evolution of Jane, 1998, etc.) focuses this time on three women: Lotte, the matriarch of a Jewish family transplanted to California, has recently been diagnosed with facial skin cancer. Her daughter Greta, a landscape artist married to a nice if slightly abstract doctor, adores her mother and does not resent caring for Lotte. Elizabeth, Greta's daughter, is an academic in New York, but by lucky coincidence she has been hired by the movie mogul Larry Volfman, a secret intellectual, to adapt Madame Bovary for the screen. With her loving boyfriend, whom she won't commit to marry, and their excessively lovable three-year-old son Harry, she moves to LA just in time to help care for Lotte, who is, as she herself likes to repeat, "a pistol," as elegant and feisty as ever. Earthy, nurturing Greta is thrilled to have her daughter near but keeps her feelings in check. Elizabeth's life, complete with a big salary, a cottage in Venice, and an SUV, seems almost perfect. Then Greta is diagnosed with colon cancer. She keeps her own cancer a secret from Lotte, but Elizabeth must step in and help both patients more. She's exhausted, pulled by conflicting responsibilities. As Lotte very privately comes to grips with her approaching death, Elizabeth finds herself attracted both to Volfman and to her younger brother's best friend, even though Brett is the most patient and loving of romantic heroes. Meanwhile, Greta not only struggles with chemotherapy but with her growing, out-of-the-blue passion for Daisy Piperino, the female director with whom Elizabeth is working. There are many references to Flaubert's novel, but Schine's domestic melodrama is short on real drama, with characters all too nice and understanding to create more than a mild stir. Capable but bland. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Elizabeth, an academic with expertise in literature, publishes a paper about Madame Bovary and gets noticed by a Hollywood producer. So she moves to California with her partner, Brett, and their son, Harry, to work on a screenplay. Happily, both her parents and her grandmother live in L.A.; unhappily, both her mother and grandmother have cancer. Elizabeth then finds herself immersed in the new worlds of moviemaking and cancer treatment. The dynamic between Elizabeth and her family members is fluid, with tensions ebbing and flowing like the tide. Add to this the theme of adultery, which is central to the movie but also influential in the lives of Elizabeth and her mother. The men in the book appear to be completely unable to understand any of the goings-on in the lives of their women; they retreat to the golf course and the beach as much as possible. In this, her sixth novel, Schine captures the multiple layers of family existence at all ages and stages of life and death. Well read by Patricia Kalember, the story is laced with comedy, irony, and drama, with entertaining and very diverse characters. Recommended.-Joanna M. Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
