When We Argued All Night (39 page)
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More by Alice Mattison
NOTHING IS QUITE FORGOTTEN IN BROOKLYN
Constance Tepper is staying in her mother's Brooklyn apartment while her mother is out of town, and her week turns frightening when she wakes to find someone has entered the apartment and taken her purse. A series of revelations jeopardizes her marriage, her job, and her love for an older woman who has mesmerized Con all her life. Years later, now living in Brooklyn, Con is brought back to that week when reminders and discoveries lead to grief, love, and the unraveling of the pastâpersonal and historicalâas she crosses the city, from Coney Island to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from Prospect Heights to the traces of a lost elevated train line: a forgotten, century-old attempt to make sense of Brooklyn's peculiarities once and for all, through public transportation.
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“A generous, empathetic writer, [Mattison] believes that the human connection, while imperfect and fragile, takes precedence over any abstraction.”
âNew York Times
IN CASE WE'RE SEPARATED
Spanning the length and breadth of the twentieth century, Alice Mattison's masterful
In Case We're Separated
looks at a family of Jewish immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s and follows the urban, emotionally turbulent lives of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren against a backdrop of political assassination, the Vietnam War, and the AIDS epidemic. Beginning with the title story, which introduces Bobbie Kaplowitzâa single mother in 1954 Brooklyn whose lover is married and whose understanding of life is changed by a broken kitchen applianceâ Mattison displays her unparalleled gift for storytelling and for creating rich, multidimensional characters, a gift that has led the
Los Angeles Times
to praise her as “a writer's writer.”
“Radiant. . . . A book filled with felicitous writing and ferocious insight.”
â
Susan Halpern
,
New York Times Book Review
THE WEDDING OF THE TWO-HEADED WOMAN
For years, following an early first marriage, Daisy Andalusia remained single and enjoyed the company of men on her own terms, making the most of her independent life. Now in her fifties, she has remarried and settled into a quieter life in New Haven, Connecticut. She's committed to a job she loves: organizing the clutter of other people's lives. Her business soon leads her to a Yale project studying murders in small cities. While her husband, an inner-city landlord, objects to her new interest, Daisy finds herself being drawn more and more into the project and closer to its director, Gordon Skeetling.
When Daisy discovers an old tabloid article with the headline “Two-Headed Woman Weds Two Men: Doc Says She's Twins,” she offers it as the subject for her theater group's improvisational play. Over eight transformative months, this headline will take on an increasing significance as Daisy questions whether she can truly be a part of anythingâ a two-headed woman, a friendship, a marriageâwhile discovering more about herself than she wants to know.
“Bracingly serious but without pretension, Mattison's voice is like that of no one else writing today: the demands she makes of her readers are difficult but exhilarating.”
âKirkus Reviews
(starred review)
HILDA AND PEARL
To Frances, an only child living in McCarthy-era Brooklyn, her mother, Hilda, and her aunt Pearl seem as if they have always been friends. Frances does not question the love between the two women until her father's job as a teacher is threated by anti-Communism, just as Frances begins to learn about her family's past. Why does Hilda refer to her “first pregnancy,” as if Frances wasn't her only child? Whose baby shoes are hidden in Hilda's dresser drawer? Why is there tension when Pearl and her husband come to visit?
The story of a young girl in the fifties and her elders' coming-of-age in the unquiet thirties, this book resonates deeply, revealing in beautiful, clear language the complexities of friendship and loss.
“Accomplished poet, novelist, and short-story writer Mattison adds to her laurels with this quietly suspenseful, psychologically penetrating novel, which is both a perceptive study of adolescence and a dramatic exploration of family relationships.”
âPublishers Weekly
THE BOOK BORROWER
On the first page of
The Book Borrower
, Toby Ruben and Deborah Laidlaw meet in 1975 in a playground, where the two women are looking after their babies. Deborah lends Toby a book,
Trolley Girl
âa memoir about a long-ago trolley strike and three Jewish sisters, one a fiery revolutionaryâthat will disappear and reappear throughout the twenty-two years these women are friends.
Through two decades, Deborah and Toby raise their children, embark on teaching careers, and argue about politics, education, and their own lives. One day during a hike, they have an argument that cannot be resolvedâ and the two women take different, permanent pathsâbut it is ultimately the borrowed book that will bring them back together. With sensitivity and grace, Alice Mattison shows how books can rescue us from our deepest sorrows; how the events of the outside world play into our private lives; and how the bonds between women are enduring, mysterious, and laced with surprise.
“Extraordinary.”
âWashington Post Book World
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“An ambitious and original novel.”
âWall Street Journal
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NOVELS
Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn
The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman
The Book Borrower
Hilda and Pearl
Field of Stars
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
In Case We're Separated
Men Giving Money, Women Yelling
The Flight of Andy Burns
Great Wits
POETRY COLLECTION
Animals
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
WHEN WE ARGUED ALL NIGHT
. Copyright © 2012 by Alice Mattison. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Epub Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780062120380
ISBN 978-0-06-212037-3
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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