Overview

"""By turns revealing, hilarious, dishy, and razor-sharp, Impersonation lives in that rarest of sweet spots: the propulsive page-turner for people with high literary standards."" --Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers TOGETHER, THEY MAKE THE PERFECT FEMINIST MOTHER Allie Lang is a professional ghostwriter and a perpetually broke single mother to a young boy. Years of navigating her own and America's cultural definition of motherhood have left her a lapsed idealist. Lana Breban is a high-profile lawyer, economist, and advocate for women's rights with designs on elected office. She also has a son. Lana and her staff have decided she needs help softening her image in the eyes of the public and that a memoir about her life as a mother will help. Allie struggles to write Lana's book as obstacles pile up: not enough childcare, looming deadlines, an unresponsive subject, an ill-defined romantic relationship on the verge of slipping away. Eventually, Lana comes to require far too much of Allie and even her son. Allie's ability to stand up for herself and ask for all that she deserves will ultimately determine the power that she can wield over her own life. With the satirical eye of Tom Perrotta's Mrs. Fletcher and the incisiveness of Meg Wolitzer's The Female Persuasion, acclaimed writer Heidi Pitlor tells a timely, bitingly funny, and insightful story of ambition, motherhood, and class."

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9781616207915

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Reviews

Smart, funny, and provocative, Impersonation tunnels through our current politically-charged American landscape with humor and empathy. It's a story of parenting--and surviving--in a time when the messy realities of everyday life often clash with ideology. As page-turningly readable as it is relatable. I'll be recommending to my book group. --Jessica Shattuck, author of The Women in the Castle Impersonation is the book we need now: an unflinching look at our current moment, and at questions few of us dare to ask. If our personas do good in the world, does it matter what we did to create them? How much hypocrisy are liberals willing to tolerate? Can women raise good men? Provocative, heartfelt, and often hilarious, this is a novel I'll be thinking about for a long time to come. --Anna Solomon, author of The Book of V With refreshing humor and an endearing charm all her own, Heidi Pitlor channels the narrative slyness of Rachel Cusk and the political acumen of Rebecca Solnit to deliver this zeitgeisty novel about the struggles of anonymity, accountability, modern-day mothering, and making ends meet in the gig economy. As both loss and possibility swirl around our lost but scrappy heroine, you can't help but root for her to claim her own voice and personhood. A smart behind-the-scenes tour of the murky world of publishing, politics, and the good people who get caught in the cross-fire. --Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men For our heroine Allison, this is her story of survival and endurance in these maddening times. She goes to extraordinary measures for her son and her work, yet the path is not always clear, and far from easy. A gifted storyteller, Pitlor is also not afraid to ask the tough questions. What does it mean to raise good boys? Good people? What does it mean to be a woman, a feminist, a believer in others and, above all, in yourself? --Weike Wang, author of Chemistry

Author Information

Heidi Pitlor is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage. She has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007 and the editorial director of Plympton, a literary studio. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Huffington Post, Ploughshares, and the anthologies It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art and Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers. She lives outside Boston.

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