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Summary
Summary
Holly Frick has just endured the worst kind of breakup: the kind where you're still in love with the person leaving you. While her wounds are still dangerously close to the surface, her happily married best friend confesses over a bottle of wine that she is this close to having an affair. And another woman comes to Holly for advice about her love life--with Holly's ex! Holly decides that if everyone around her can take pleasure wherever they find it, so will she. As any self-respecting 30ish New York woman would do, she brings two males into her life: a flawed but endearing dog, and a good natured, much younger lover. She's soon entangled in a web of emails, chance meetings, and misguided good intentions and must forge an entirely new path to Nirvana. From the author of The Big Love, Secrets to Happiness is a big-hearted, knife-sharp, and hilariously entertaining story about the perils of love and friendship, sex and betrayal--and a thoroughly modern take on our struggle to be happy.
Author Notes
Sarah Dunnhas moved from Los Angeles to New York five times, and from New York back to Los Angeles four times, which means she is happily back in New York, where she lives with her husband, Peter Stevenson, and their son, Harry. Her first novel,The Big Love, has been translated into 23 languages.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Dunn charts several New Yorkers' lives in this snappy novel. The spotlight most often falls on Holly Frick, a 35-year-old divorcee whose egg walls "are taking on the consistency of tissue paper as we speak." A writer whose cheeky first novel bombed, Holly now resides low enough on the TV totem pole to be cranking out after-school dreck with her gay pal Leonard. Meanwhile, her best friend, Amanda, is cheating on her husband, and Holly adopts Chester, a cute little dog with cancer whose hopeful approach to life mirrors Holly's. While Holly's love life follows a formula-familiar trajectory, Amanda's romantic flailing ensnares Holly, and Chester's destiny takes an unexpected turn that means big changes for both of them. Although cliches pop up (the supergay friend, a $1,200 purse splurge), the energetic and witty prose speeds along the narrative. It's smarter than the usual single-in-the-city fare, and funnier, too. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Holly Frick is smart and sassy, loyal and dedicated. All the qualities a woman could want in a girlfriend, but not the ones that seem to resonate with men, if her roster of failed relationships is any indicator. There's her ex-husband, Alex, with whom she's still in love; her ex-boyfriend, Spence, a womanizing creep whom Holly scathingly immortalized in her first novel; and Lucas, a 22-year-old boy-toy who, for all his playful sexuality, ultimately makes Holly feel like a cradle-robbing matron. But then she meets Jack, an opinionated Buddhist who is having an affair with her married best friend; and even though Holly takes an immediate dislike to him, she has to admit there's something undeniable lurking just beneath the surface. Dunn displays a rapier wit; a perfectly nuanced gift for savvy, sophisticated dialogue; and an endearing moral compass, which she uses to great advantage as she blithely navigates the fraught and fatuous world of trendy New York's treacherous dating scene.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HOLLY FRICK, the writer at the heart of Sarah Dunn's new novel, hates the term "chick lit." Since we never actually get to read her own novel, "Hello, Mr. Heartache" - whose horrible title was imposed by her publisher's marketing department - we can't be certain that she hasn't actually written "fiction by and for women," the generally agreed-upon definition of that loathsome term. But the novel in which Holly herself appears was definitely not written just for women, no matter how it's packaged. True, the protagonist is female, the setting is Manhattan, and the focus is on relationships - and there's a big shopping scene. True, mostly women will read it. But then women are the ones mostly reading everything. Besides, it's not about shoes. And the shopping is for books, at the Strand. Also, unlike chick lit, chick TV and chick movies, "Secrets to Happiness" is actually funny. New York, with which Holly feels "trapped in an abusive relationship," is generously featured, and the usual tourist spots are included - Central Park, the Cloisters, the bar at the Carlyle. But this isn't the glamorous, romantic version of Manhattan. Holly really works for a living, writing for a not-very-successful children's cable TV show, and she doesn't make enough money to navigate the city with careless ease. Her New York is the kind of place where desperate characters throw a party in a BMW showroom to introduce a perfume that smells like Fruit Roll-Ups. For a novel about a writer, "Secrets to Happiness" is refreshingly straight-forward about the profession. An old boyfriend is outraged to discover that Holly has used him in her novel in a recognizable way. Like any pro, she claims this is naïve nonsense: fictional characters have multiple inspirations; he's just being paranoid and narcissistic. In reality, of course, she has changed only his name and the color of his eyes. Why slog through Imagination Land when you've got the character right there in your memory and you don't owe him a damn thing? And Holly doesn't just behave like a writer; she has a writer's perceptions. In the middle of sex - satisfying sex - with a man she loves, she finds herself face-to-face with a pile of books on his nightstand. Of course, she tunes out to read the titles on the spines. Granted, "Secrets to Happiness" doesn't have a whole lot of narrative pull. Holly starts out semi-divorced and lonely and meanders through a series of amusing, somewhat disjointed episodes on her way to what promises to be a hopeful resolution. She's so sensible and clever that we don't really worry about her judgment. All around her, doleful characters make poor choices, but Holly is morally grounded, which makes her attractive to people who aren't. When they behave badly, they can count on her to notice, but without being intrusive about it. Holly's best friend confesses that she has cheated on her husband and wants Holly to meet the guy. But Holly declines, explaining that she feels guilty even knowing about the infidelity. "Somebody should feel guilty," she adds, "and I tend to feel all the feelings in the room." Amazingly, she can pull off a statement like that without being tiresome or priggish. In the end, what makes Dunn's novel such a pleasure to read is the very thing that keeps it from being a breathless page-turner: Holly's singular spirituality. She may be as baffled as everyone else about how to achieve happiness, but she also knows that happiness isn't all it's cracked up to be. In a world - fictional and non- - where doing a good thing gets you accused of having a messiah complex, and doing whatever you want is justified as following your path, Holly never stops trying to figure out where her duty lies. Underneath it all - the sex, the shopping, the city - she's an old-fashioned heroine. Also funny. Jincy Willett's most recent novel is "The Writing Class."
Kirkus Review
A newly divorced scriptwriter's search for happiness involves lovers old and new and an adopted dog with a brain tumor. Sharp-witted Dunn follows her debut (The Big Love, 2004) with a predictably formatted tale simultaneously elevated by its snappy humor and tinged by some reflective shading. Although the story's principal focus is Holly35 and only one year out of her marriage to an unfaithful spouseit also includes the perspectives of several friends and colleagues, each trying to find fulfillment and dodge failure. Best friend Amanda, although seemingly happy in her marriage, has started an affair; Holly's gay writing partner Leonard is living beyond his means while his career slides into oblivion; Betsy, sister to Holly's young lover Lucas, is beginning to feel desperate about her stalled job and dismal love life; and promiscuous Spence, one of Holly's earlier ex-lovers, is starting to find his cheating, one-night stands and dull dates unsatisfactory. Neurotic and New York-y, these characters exchange oddly similar banter while contemplating their individual life paths and beliefs, before embarking on different, possibly more gratifying chapters. Holly's progress includes nursing the dog with cancer back to health, meeting a possible Mr. Right, losing him again, losing the dog too, but finding new and hopeful next versions of both. Deft repartee and happy endings all around don't entirely erase the underlying bleakness in this smart chick-lit tale with dark undertones. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Like Dunn's heroine in her debut, The Big Love, Holly Frick is brokenhearted and looking for happiness against the backdrop of hectic New York City. Holly believes in doing the right thing. Whether it's a result of her evangelical Christian upbringing or just a generally overactive conscience, the "right thing" includes adopting a dog with a brain tumor and meeting her married friend's paramour because her friend thinks they'll like each other. The assorted cast of supporting characters includes a 22-year-old lover, a skinny girl who finally agrees to date the overweight guy from her gym, and a gay man who has an unhealthy relationship with his attention deficit disorder meds. These characters circle around Holly in an exploration of six degrees of separation as she touches each of them-and they her-in their quests for happiness. Readers of Dunn's previous novel and fans of Jennifer Weiner and Jane Green will enjoy the sophisticated tone of this classic searching-for-love story. Recommended for popular fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/08.]-Anika Fajardo, Coll. of St. Catherine Lib., St. Paul (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
