Ditched by Dr. Right
And Other Distress Signals from the Edge of Polite Society
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In witty slice-of-life vignettes and laugh-out-loud cultural riffs, Elizabeth Warner shares her divinely demented view of the world. Raised by a mild-mannered psychiatrist father and a slightly off-kilter mother, Warner opted out of the life that awaited the youth of WASP heaven (aka Philadelphia’s Main Line)–that is, to be “typically weaned, whelped, and privately schooled, whereupon you move on to the roost-and-spawn phase.”
Yet no matter how far afield she ventures–to New York to become a master junk-mail marketer or to L.A. to do a little acting–Warner can’t help but feel that sometimes she’s getting nowhere fast on “some kind of Protestant monorail to doom.”
Whether she’s spelling out the invisible word “help” on a guy’s shoulder blades during unfulfilling sex, getting out of jury duty by smearing herself with soy sauce, or convincing her mother that the words “career girl” are not her death knell, Warner proves that sometimes it doesn’t matter where you go in life–just as long as you’ve got a killer punch line.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Late in this collection of vignettes, Warner, a promotional copywriter turned actor-writer-performer, describes how, having moved to Los Angeles from New York, she finds herself in a rut. She begins to "tell everyone the absolute and often unpleasant truth," including her opinion that one-person shows are nothing but "whiny me-fests." This characterization could also apply to Warner's book, which snarkily recounts a number of stories from her childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Having grown up the daughter of a psychiatrist on Philadelphia's old-money Main Line, gone to college and then taken a copywriting job in New York, she details a number of her experiences which she sees as unique or weird or amusing, ranging from the time she and her mother bought a mouse for her brother's pet snake to when she bought a dishwasher. But Warner's stories simply aren't that unique, and the way she tells them doesn't make them so. Warner's frequent name-dropping to show readers how culturally literate she is (at one point, references to Kurt Cobain, Dick Francis, Patricia Neal and Tennessee Williams all appear on the same page) seems unnecessary, and even when the writing is slightly amusing, it can also come off as mean. Warner says that she's performed some of these stories as monologues, and perhaps they're more effective as such.
