Single, Carefree, Mellow - Couverture souple

Heiny, Katherine

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0008105553 ISBN 13 : 9780008105556

Editeur : Fourth Estate Ltd, 2015

A propos du livre

Revue de presse

“Katherine Heiny's work does something magical: elevates the mundane so that it has the stakes of a mystery novel, gives women's interior lives the gravity they so richly deserve -- and makes you laugh along the way.”
—Lena Dunham

“Heiny’s wry, bittersweet debut . . . is something like Cheever mixed with Ephron: white, middle-class suburban discontent simmering below the surface, but treated with a light touch that keeps the focus squarely on the woman’s point of view. . . . Heiny is very good at portraying the circumscribed landscapes, both literal and emotional, in which her characters live. She also gives credence to what is still a conundrum for many women: What role can I play in a world in which I am neither fully ‘carefree’ and ‘mellow’ when single, nor entirely ‘giving’ and ‘content’ when attached?”
—Naomi Fry, The New York Times Book Review 

“Single, Carefree, Mellow[’s] characters might have stepped out of Girls—grown-up but still groping toward happiness . . . These are wry, winning stories you won’t forget soon.”
—People Magazine, Book of the Week

“Sharply perceptive . . . Ms. Heiny [has] powers of writerly seduction . . . Cutely absurd enough to have the makings of a sitcom . . . The wit and character are given time to develop . . . Don’t miss ‘Blue Heron Bridge,’ in which the obligatory affair is fraught with very funny snobbery on the part of Nina, a married woman involved with a younger man . . . Ms. Heiny [has a] gift for dreaming up otherwise smart women who lapse into temporary insanity while besotted.”
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“For the commitment-averse women in Katherine Heiny’s deceptively lighthearted debut story collection, Single, Carefree, Mellow, falling in love entails ‘a long series of choices in which you were always unhappy that you couldn’t choose two things at the same time.’”
—Megan O’Grady, Vogue

“Katherine Heiny’s first collection, Single, Carefree, Mellow, is a tour de force about love, deception, friendship, and flirtation. Several stories feature smart, sexy Maya, who in the title story becomes love-struck by her dog’s veterinarian.”
—Elle

“Heiny . . . is an expert on the baffled and titillated frustration of trying to deal with men and women who go through life so thoroughly untouched . .  It’s no small trick to write with lightness and humor that nevertheless has an edge of tartness, but in story after story, Heiny does so with aplomb. Her work is sharp and refreshing, a parade of gin and tonics that somehow never get you drunker than that first expansive, thoughtful buzz.”
—Michelle Wildgen, Tin House

"Each story in Katherine Heiny's collection doles out gems that are so authentic and outrageous I wanted to read them out loud to a friend over the phone...Be ready to laugh and hoot, and then buy Single, Carefree, Mellow for all your girlfriends — but probably not your mother-in-law."
—Justine Kenin, NPR 

“Not all of the women in Katherine Heiny's clever collection of short stories are single, carefree, and mellow, but there is a breeziness that connects them all and makes the book so pleasantly readable. The women — one in love with her roommate, another pregnant and having an affair, another a young girl sleeping with a married man — are full-fleshed and deftly realized, if a little complacent, and their familiar stories of love and heartache sort of settle into a hopeful ambiguity. It's a perfect spring read.”
—Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed Books

“In the pantheon of very bad ideas, agreeing to meet your lover’s wife for a drink would seem to fall somewhere between sticking a fork in a toaster and walking blindfolded into traffic. And yet Sasha, the twentysomething protagonist of Single, Carefree, Mellow’s opening story, ‘The Dive Bar,’ decides to put on her favorite earrings and do exactly that . . . Refreshingly liberated and free of judgment . . . Single, Carefree, Mellow is a lot like the women who populate it: smart and sexy and a little bit ruthless.”
—Leah Greenblat, Entertainment Weekly

“Chances are you've already heard the buzz on this collection of short stories, each of which has a relationship or affair at its center. But no matter how good you imagine it is, it's better. Seemingly, there isn't a lying woman Heiny can't make you love; there isn't a devastating situation she can't make you laugh during . . . I promise, you'll find a cathartic, strikingly personal moment somewhere in these stories, even if you've never been a mistress or put your dog to sleep (yes, bring tissues for that one).”
—Megan Angelo, Glamour.com

“Gorgeous . . . The women of Single, Carefree, Mellow, Katherine Heiny’s ironically titled debut short story collection, may have husbands and boyfriends in addition to their lovers on the side, but these myriad of men don’t make them happy. You feel them constantly searching the horizons for some indefinitely better deal or validation than guys they are romantically involved in can provide. Heavy lies the crown made of Grrrl Power. . . There is a strangely affirming agency threaded through these tightly written shorts.”
—Drew Grant, NY Observer

“Witty short stories for lazy afternoons.”
—SELF

“To encounter the wry, funny stories in Katherine Heiny's Single, Carefree, Mellow is to experience the best form of simultaneous pleasure and sadness . . . Heiny's narrators offer a pleasure not unlike new friendship . . . They are so smart, and so moving, that I intend to read them again . . . They also perform the act central to the best literature: They remind us that we are not alone.”
—Elizabeth Langemak, Philadelphia Tribune

“The buzziest book of 2015 would have to be Single, Carefree, Mellow, a saucy short-story collection that took Katherine Heiny more than 22 years to write. . . This whip-smart collection about women wrapped up in all kinds of love affairs will have you laughing out loud.” 
—Most Anticipated Books of 2015, Entertainment Weekly 

“Ms. Heiny’s explosive start as a writer carries a whiff of legend, probably because of her disappearance from the literary scene for nearly two decades. Many of the stories feature women dissatisfied with their spouses and boyfriends and sometimes their illicit lovers . . .  She smuggles in zingy one-liners . . . but much of the humor is situational.”
—Alexandra Alter, The New York Times 

“WOW . . . Laugh out loud funny, and smart, and amazing! Heiny's writing is first rate, and her observations and perspectives on the damages we inflict on one another are razor sharp.”
—Bookriot

“‘How to Give the Wrong Impression’ falls somewhere between Anne Beattie and Patricia Highsmith—a young girl starts to pretend her roommate Boris is her domestic partner, and then takes it way too far. This—everyday life, slightly tweaked—is Heiny’s territory, and her investigations manage to be both heartbreaking and darkly comic.”
—The Atlantic 
 
“A quirky delight . . . Heiny is slyly funny throughout and subversive in her attitude toward the romantic misadventures of her heroines, which she treats as having far less moral weight than convention would demand.”
—Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch 
 
“Heiny has created women—and placed men around them—who are complex, flawed and not always likable in ways that are recognizable, sometimes wincingly so, which I find refreshing and liberating. She holds no punches, but often her subtle, wry humor softens the blows.
—Sari Botton, Longreads 
 
“Incredible . . . startling, but strangely endearing . . . There’s the detached 17-year-old girl who’s sleeping with her history teacher; Maya, a librarian, who cheats on her loving fiancé; Nina, a Florida housewife who’s having an affair with her trainer . . . each of these thoroughly modern women are neither good nor bad; they’re somewhere in between, like most of us are. You’ll love Heiny’s clean, subtle prose, which is often hilarious and always uncannily insightful.”
—Caroline Goldstein, Bustle 

“Don’t start this collection of short stories at bedtime unless you are willing to lose some sleep . . . Heiny captures the funny, awful, awkward, touching moments of young women’s lives in a voice that is fresh and honest and basically the opposite of the get-off-my-grass Millennial-haters who sometimes think they’ve got the market cornered on literary writing. I thought I’d dip in and out of it, and instead I devoured it whole. Great stuff.”
—Rebecca Schinsky, Inbox/Outbox on Bookriot

“This radiant collection of short stories features a set of flawed yet sympathetic women in a whole mess of compromising positions . . . Many of the women in these beautifully wrought stories are single, but they are anything but carefree or mellow . . . First-time author Katherine Heiny takes great care to make her characters relatable even in their imperfections. She paints sweetly resonant moments that also can be very funny . . . Single, Carefree, Mellow is named for a story in which Maya ponders leaving her boyfriend of five years, then decides there is “such a thing as too much loss.” It’s a poignant moment that sums up this smart exploration of love and betrayal, and that fine line between happiness and pain.”
—Amy Scribner, Bookpage 

“Heiny explores sex, relationships and the internal lives of young women in this charmingly candid collection of short stories. The women who populate the pages of Heiny's disarming debut are girlfriends, mistresses and wives. They are best friends, roommates and lovers. They are intelligent but not always ambitious—keenly insightful but sometimes, perhaps willfully, blind to their own deeper desires—with loyalties and libidos that may be at odds and morals that may be in question. Despite the title, not all are single (or carefree or mellow), but they are all singular, and following their stories is like sitting at a dive bar tossing back deceptively pretty, surprisingly strong drinks with a pal who may not always make the best decisions but always comes away with the most colorful tales... These young women are sympathetic and slyly seductive, sometimes selfish and maddeningly un-self-aware, but they are beguilingly human, and readers will yield to their charms.”
—Kirkus (starred)

"Katherine Heiny’s smart and stylishly-written stories are a delight. The women who populate this book—from a teenager in a relationship with her history teacher, in the terrific story 'The Rhett Butlers,' to a graduate student with a crush on her roommate, to several unfaithful suburban wives—are wonderfully human and relatable, both hapless and full of heart."
–Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P

“Not since Laurie Colwin has a writer so poignantly and wittily depicted the joys of infidelity. Katherine Heiny knows the secret: happy marriages make for happy affairs. Also happy readers.”
—Susan Rieger, author of The Divorce Papers

“Funny and heartfelt . . . Few characters are single and even fewer are carefree—though most long to be. Instead, they are remorseful about their disloyalties, torn between spouses and secret lovers, and guilt-ridden over the betrayals they commit in the name of love . . . Maya, who appears in several more stories in various stages of life and love, is one of many captivating characters expertly imagined by Heiny . . . An exceptionally humorous collection by a talented new writer.”
—Lisa Block, Library Journal (starred)

“The female protagonists of Single, Carefree, Mellow tipple and titillate, fantasize and fumble, worry and wander. They make poor choices in men and children’s birthday entertainment. They make wise choices in what to wear to meet their lovers’ wives.”
—Kirkus

“Single, Carefree, Mellow is a book about heartache, adultery, love, and loss that somehow manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and wise, sometimes in the very same sentence.  It’s full of lines so smart and sharp that I was compelled to stop and read them out loud to my friends. This book is amazing, brilliant, and nothing short of wonderful.”
—Jennifer Close, author of Girls in White Dresses and The Smart One
 
"Katherine Heiny where have you been all my life? Single, Carefree, Mellow is among the most insightful, funny, and smart collections I’ve read in a very long time. The unfaithful lovers and spouses that populate so many of these stories remain lovable and true despite their bad behavior and questionable choices. And their happy endings feel earned and unsentimental. How did you pull that off? There are echoes of Lorrie Moore, Melissa Bank, and even Alice Munro, but the voice is fresh and original throughout. More, more, more. Please!"
—Stephen McCauley, author of The Object of My Affection and Insignificant Others
 
“Formed of ten exquisitely-composed stories (all featuring women in various states of love), Heiny's book takes a disarming and wry look at the inherent nature of betrayal and secrets within relationships.”
—Elle UK
 
“Lots of short story collections have been coming my way lately, and early 2015 seems especially rich in that regard. This debut collection, which bowled me over on first read, deserves a special shout out.”
— Ten Big Breakout Authors | Fiction Previews, Library Journal

Extrait

THE DIVE BAR

So picture Sasha innocently sitting alone in her apartment on a hot summer afternoon and the phone rings. She answers and a woman says, “This is Anne.”

“Who?” says Sasha.

“I think you know,” Anne says.

“Well, I don’t.” Sasha is not trying to be difficult. She honestly doesn’t know. She is trying to think of possible Annes whose voices she should recognize. Is it someone she missed an appointment with? Is this the owner of that camera she found in a cab last month and kept—­

“I’m Carson’s wife,” Anne says.

Sasha says, “Oh!” And even if she sat around from now until eternity saying Oh! every few seconds, she would never be able to inject it with as many layers of significance and wonder again.

“I was thinking we ought to have a drink,” Anne says. And to paraphrase Dr. Seuss, Sasha does not know quite what to say. Should she meet her for drinks? Now what should she do? Well, what would you do if your married lover’s wife asked you?

After the phone call, Sasha finds she is too agitated to stay in the apartment, so she calls her roommate, Monique, at work. Monique is just leaving, so they decide that Sasha will walk down Broadway from 106th Street and Monique will walk up Broadway from Thirty-­sixth, and they will have a drink in whichever establishment they happen to meet in front of.

Because Sasha is anxious, she walks faster than Monique and they end up meeting in front of a Taco Tico on Sixty-­fourth Street, but they cheat slightly and go into an Irish bar next door.

“Wow,” says Monique when Sasha tells her about Anne’s phone call. “That must have been so humiliating for her when you didn’t recognize her name.”

Sasha frowns slightly. Isn’t Monique supposed to be on her side about this? Besides, it wasn’t that she’d forgotten Anne’s name, it was that Carson never used it. Always he said my wife. I have to go, my wife is expecting me. Let me call my wife and tell her I’ll be late.

“And how did she know your name?” Monique asks.

“I guess Carson told her that when he told her about me,” Sasha says.

“So when are you meeting her?”

“Next Wednesday.”

Monique looks startled. “That’s a long way away.”

“I think so, too,” says Sasha. “But she was all sort of businesslike and obviously flipping through a calendar, saying, ‘Now let’s see when can I fit you in,’ and next Wednesday was evidently the first opening.”

“Do you think she’s planning to murder you?” Monique asks, finishing the last of her beer.

“No, because we’re meeting at a bar on Amsterdam and Ninety-­ninth,” Sasha says. “It’s not like she’s luring me to some remote underpass.”

“Not to change the subject,” Monique says, digging into her bag and pulling out a brochure. “But will you come with me to this singles volunteer thing tomorrow? We’re refurbishing a brownstone for a needy family.”

“I thought you were doing that singles grocery night thing,” Sasha says. “On Thursdays.”

“Well, I was until last Thursday!” Monique says, looking all het up. “When I had this long intense talk with a man in the checkout line and it turned out he works for Lambda Legal and was just there because he needed salad stuff.”

“They should limit entrance to the store on those nights,” Sasha says.

“So will you come with me?” Monique says. “Or, unless, I guess, now that Carson has left his wife, maybe you’re not single anymore.”

This sounds vaguely insulting, and more than a little negative, so Sasha says, “I’ll see.”

After meeting Monique, Sasha takes the subway down to Carson’s club, where he’s been staying for the past two weeks. Sasha loves his club—­the threadbare stateliness of it, the way the staff flirt with her, the masculine rooms. She doesn’t care if he lives there forever.

She happens to meet Carson in the lobby, where he is collecting his mail, and in the elevator, she tells him about the phone call.

He looks startled. “She called you?”

“Yes, and asked me out for a drink.”

“Well, I don’t think you should go,” Carson says. “She’s not a nice drunk.”

The elevator stops and some other people get on, so Sasha is left to digest this piece of information in silence. Anne is not a nice drunk. She can add this to the only other two details Carson has ever revealed about Anne, which is that she works as an administrator for a nonprofit charity for the homeless and that it drives him crazy the way she never empties the fluff out of the dryer filter. Sasha wonders if it’s some sort of flaw in her character that she was never more curious about Anne. Shouldn’t she have been fascinated, eaten up by jealousy, followed them on marital outings?

Once they get to Carson’s room, she says, “How is she not a nice drunk?”

Carson is flipping through his mail. “She just repeats herself endlessly. But she repeats herself endlessly when she’s sober, too.”

Another piece of information! Maybe Sasha should have been asking questions all along. “But why do you think she wants to meet me? Is she going to murder me?”

“Ha,” says Carson, dumping his mail on the desk. “She might bore you to death, but otherwise you’re pretty safe.”

The fact that Carson finds Anne so boring is slightly shocking to Sasha. It seems to her that Carson is interested in everything. You could tell him a story without one single redeeming feature, like that the man at the bodega gave you Canadian money for change, and he would say, “Really? Which bodega was that?” (This actually happened to Sasha last week and she put the coins in her wallet and keeps accidentally trying to buy stuff with them and being yelled at by street vendors all over Manhattan.) The idea that Carson could be bored by anyone, let alone someone who maybe loves him, is distressing.

“And why did you tell her my name, anyway?” Sasha asks.

“She asked,” Carson says. “The night I told her about the affair. She said, ‘Tell me about her, I want to know about this person who’s so important to you.’ ”

Sasha says nothing. Carson told his wife about the affair two weeks ago. He said he hadn’t meant to do it, but they were discussing their marriage and she was being all nice and sympathetic and told him he could tell her if there was someone else, that she would understand. Since then, he has said, somewhat cryptically, that her attitude seems to have “undergone a change.” Even just thinking about this, it is hard for Sasha not to shake her head at the universal stupidity of men.

Sasha and Carson go out to dinner, just like a married couple. Well, maybe not a married couple, but a legitimate couple, at least, not caring anymore if anyone sees them. During dinner, he asks about the book Sasha is writing and Sasha is suddenly conscious of being boring. Should she be talking about Syria, or global warming?

It’s only due to Carson that Sasha writes books at all. He was the one who encouraged her when an editor approached her about writing young adult romance novels, who told her, who cares if it’s YA, you’re still making a living by writing, and he was the one who sent her two dozen salmon-­colored roses during the weekend in which she had to read two dozen young adult romances so that she could write the next one in the series. (She did it, too, though sometimes she feels she was never the same afterward.) And now Sasha, who never even had much of a job before, has a career, of sorts, and is offered four-­book contracts and gets to stay home all day in her pajamas and really loves what she does. Also, Carson has proven exceptionally good at trouble-­shooting plot issues. The only person better at it is Monique, but she gets upset if Sasha doesn’t use her ideas, and Carson doesn’t seem to care. He can reel off a dozen possible solutions and doesn’t mind if she rejects them all.

So she tells him that all the characters in this book live on an island and she needs to find a way for all of them to miss the last ferry home, and they discuss that for the rest of dinner.

Then they go back to Carson’s room and get ready for bed, brushing their teeth together (another married couple thing!) and Carson spits in the sink and says, “I’m going to go apartment-­hunting tomorrow, and I was hoping you’d come with me.”

“I have to go to this volunteer thing with Monique,” Sasha says, without planning to. “I already promised.”

Sasha and Monique show up at the brownstone for the singles volunteer day, along with about thirty other people. The renovation is being run by a short and short-­tempered redheaded man named Willie, who seems ready to shout at any of them with the slightest provocation. Sasha can understand why he’s so grouchy, though: he has to oversee a bunch of volunteers who are all busy checking one another out instead of doing home repair. She almost feels a little sorry for the needy family who is going to move in, picturing the very low standard to which their new home will be refurbished.

Willie assigns them partners of the opposite sex and sets them to work on various tasks. Sasha’s partner is a tall blond guy named Justin and their task is to remove the wallpaper in the living room. Every fifteen minutes, Willie blows a whistle and you can switch if you don’t like your task (or, more likely, your partner, Sasha suspects).

Sasha and Justin mainly ignore each other and get on with their task. Even after the whistle blows four times, they’re still working together. But when they finally take a break and go to the water cooler, Justin looks at her for a moment and Sasha suddenly knows, with an instinct born of long experience, that he is about to tell her that he has a girlfriend or to ask for her phone number. Or both.

And sure enough, Justin says in a low voice, “I have to tell you something. I’m not really single. I just came here because my friend Paul didn’t want to come alone.”

“Me, too,” Sasha says. She hopes they are not going to have some long discussion about their respective relationships.

But Justin doesn’t mention his girlfriend again. He only says, “I’m thinking maybe I should have a singles volunteer day at my apartment. It needs repainting and a whole bunch of other stuff.”

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Fourth Estate Ltd
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0008105553
• ISBN 13: 9780008105556
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 240