Good in Bed
Authors: Jennifer Weiner
Praise for
New York Times
bestselling author
JENNIFER WEINER
“This season's beach-book Queen for a Day.”
âJanet Maslin,
The New York Times
“A fresh, funny look at a woman who conquers her obsessions with food, figure, family, and finding a nice Jewish boyâwith wit and style.”
â
Glamour
“An unpredictable and impressive debut ⦠a fresh look at the miseries visited on women by their lovers, fathers, and themselves.”
â
Kirkus Reviews
, starred review
“
Good in Bed
is as tempting as a bowl of crunchy caramel popcorn, offering a modicum of diversion for the mind and a bit of substance for the rooting heart. Weiner writes colorfully. She makes you turn the pages to find out what misadventures will next befall the heroine. Ultimately, Cannie is a character to care about.”
â
Boston Herald
“Witty and original ⦠amust-read.”
â
Publishers Weekly
, starred review
“Weiner's debut shines.â¦
Good in Bed
offers a sensitive telling of a life familiar to many and a humorous take on how the struggle can end in joy.”
âThe Associated Press
“Wildly funny and surprisingly tender ⦠a truly original story.”
âJohn Searles,
Cosmopolitan
“In rollicking prose, and with an ever-expanding cast of kooky characters, Weiner sends her heroine through the circles of comic hell.”
âMarion Winik,
Newsday
“Anyone who's ever had a bad case of the âif-onlies'ââIf only I could lose ten pounds â¦,' âIf only I could sell my screenplay â¦'âshould love this tale of one young woman, all of whose âif-onlies' come true, if not quite in the way she had imagined, thanks to her sense of humor and relentless ambition.”
â
The Star-Ledger
(Newark, NJ)
“Jennifer Weiner's
Good in Bed
is a glorious, utterly hilarious ride ⦠laugh-out-loud insights ⦠every single note is perfection.”
â
USA Today
“A fast, funny, surprisingly moving tale.”
â
Philadelphia
magazine
“Warmhearted ⦠funny and smart.”
â
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Often hilarious.⦠In less able hands, Weiner's message of self empowerment might seem too earnest, but here it's thrilling to see Cannie learn to love a larger womanâherself.”
â
US
magazine
“Succulent. A compelling romp with surprising warmth.”
âSuzanne Finnamore, author of
Otherwise Engaged
“A fresh, funny feast of a novel.⦠Jennifer Weiner is a talented writer and
Good in Bed
is a delight.”
âAnna Maxted, author of
Getting Over It
“Smart and important ⦠addresses issues of success, size, sex, and relationships, all while being a fast, fun read and consistently ringing true.”
â
Philadelphia City Paper
“Get yourself into beach-reading mode with this lightly written debut novel about a zaftig young reporter who learns to love her plus-size self.”
â
People
“A roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, wild success and bitter lows, during which Cannie finds success, peace, and even love. A warm and refreshing story.”
â
Booklist
“Cannie's adventures will strike a chord with all young women struggling to find their place in the world, especially those larger than a size eight.⦠Maeve Binchy gave us Bennie in
Circle of Friends
; now Jennifer Weiner gives us Cannie. Look for more books from Weiner.”
â
Library Journal
Books by Jennifer Weiner
Â
Good in Bed
In Her Shoes
Little Earthquakes
Goodnight Nobody
The Guy Not Taken
Certain Girls
Best Friends Forever
Fly Away Home
Then Came You
The Next Best Thing
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“Home is so sad” and “This Be the Verse” from
Collected Poems
by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 1989 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Lyrics from “Suzie Lightning” by Warren Zevon. Copyright © 1991, Giant Music Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Copyright © 2001 by Jennifer Weiner Afterword copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Weiner
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
The Washington Square Press trade paperback edition January 2008
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.
60 59 58 57 56 55
ISBN 978-0-7434-1817-1
ISBN 978-0-7434-1818-8 (ebook)
For my family
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
âPhilip Larkin
Love is nothing, nothing, nothing like they say.
âLiz Phair
NTRODUCTION
Once upon a time, there was a girl who worked in a big city.
The girlâthat would be me, and this would be thirteen years ago, in the dim and distant year of 1998âwas a dewy lass of twenty-eight. I had a great apartment in a big city, a job I loved, working as a reporter for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and writing fiction in my spare time.
I had a wonderful group of friends and coworkers, funny, cynical, idealistic people. I had a dog I adored, a trembling little rat terrier, high-strung and neatly made, who'd lie on my bed with his paws crossed and watch me get dressed with a look of consternation on his small, whiskered face, like he was thinking,
Oh. Oh, no. Please. Not that.
Life, big picture, was pretty great. But my personal life was a bit of a disaster.
I'd grown up in a picture-perfect suburb of Connecticut, the oldest of four, a bookish girl usually dealing with one oversized body part or another (a nose too big for my face, breasts too big for a twelve-year-old, a body that was, generally speaking, larger than it should have been).
My parents loved me. But, with three other kids to manage, my mother could be distracted, and my father, a psychiatrist, was given to sarcastic pronouncements and black moods, and rarely stinted when it came to letting me know when I'd disappointed himâwith my schoolwork, with my looks, with the way I struggled to relate to other kids my age.
Reading was my sustenance and my salvation; the safe place where I could crawl and hide from a bewildering world, a blanket I could
tuck around me. I lived in a house full of booksâmedical textbooks and thick biographies and novels, stacked on shelves made of unfinished planks and cinder blocks in the ranch house on Simsbury Manor Drive and then, when we moved into a bigger place, in the built-in bookshelves in the living room and family room of the four-bedroom colonial on Harvest Hill.
My parents had hundreds of books, all jumbled together on those shelves: hardcovers and paperbacks, textbooks and bestsellers, Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing, books by Henry Kissinger and David Halberstam, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Popular fiction, literary fiction, reference books,
Widow
by Lynn Caine, with vivid descriptions of her husband's death from colon cancer that gave me nightmares, and something called
A Child's History of the World
âall of it was there, all of it available. The four of us were encouraged to read whatever we wanted provided we could explain to our parents that we understood what we were reading.