April 15, 2002
Zigman's third novel, a wild tale of a woman's "transformation... from bride-to-be to madwoman" is for anyone who's ever felt prewedding jitters and the pangs of obsessive jealousy. Having left her job at a teen magazine in New York City to pursue a quieter life in Washington, D.C., Zigman's narrator, Elise, meets her perfect guy—Donald, a reformed bond trader now teaching English at Sidwell Friends—on the Delta shuttle. Or her almost perfect guy. Donald's one fault is that he was engaged to Adrienne, and her
name crops up in just about every conversation. Though Donald and Elise swiftly fall in love and begin planning their wedding, Elise cannot help obsessing over the brilliant and "horrifyingly gorgeous" former fiancée. But like the paranoiac who is
being followed, Elise may have good reason to be jealous. Only months before the wedding, Adrienne takes a job in Washington, D.C., and reinserts herself into Donald's life, fueling Elise's jealousy as well as a slapstick plot having to do with Donald's dog, Elise's wedding dress and liposuction. Zigman is better at caricature than characterization, and her emphatic, read-aloud style sometimes falls flat on the page. Yet some scenes—when Donald meets Elise, for instance—are fresh and smart and almost perfect, as are many of her one-liners. (May)Forecast:Zigman's
Animal Husbandry was made into the movie
Someone Like You (starring Ashley Judd), and
Her, which smacks of
My Best Friend's Wedding and other zany takes on upcoming nuptials, is begging to be sent to Hollywood, too. Zigman—who's as zippy with the one-liners in conversation as she is in writing—will plug her book on NPR and
Today, and these appearances, plus certain attention in women's magazines, will win her new fans.
August 5, 2002
After leaving her stressful job at a teen magazine, Elise, a 34-year-old grad student and freelance editor, meets Donald, a "freakishly" tall, handsome private school teacher who's recently swapped his hectic Manhattan existence for a simpler life in Washington, D.C. Romance and an engagement ensue, though Elise's wedding jitters evolve into unbridled paranoia when she discovers Donald's well-connected, younger, thinner, taller, fuller-lipped, bigger-busted, and better educated ex-fiancé, Adrienne, has just accepted a prestigious job in Washington, and wants joint custody of their old dog. Filled with witty observations and dialogue, and a uniformly off-kilter cast of characters, Zigman's latest (following along the same tried but true lines as Bridget Jones' Diary) smoothly translates to audio, and, like her previous novel (Animal Husbandry), would easily be adapted to film. Broadway and television actress Levine interprets the tale with sarcasm, bitterness and the requisite unenthusiastic "eye-rolling tone" necessary here, capturing Donald's cluelessness and providing a good English accent for Elise's older, quirky best friend. Despite Elise's attempts to befriend Adrienne, the "evil twins of doom and gloom" win out, and her life is reduced to an endless succession of drive-bys, imagined betrayals, snooping and illicit phone message retrievals. Fans of Hugh Grant romantic comedies will devour this formulaic yet amusing tale. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Forecasts, Apr. 15)