Hey Harry, Hey Matilda
A Novel
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Hey Harry, Hey Matilda is the story—told entirely in hilarious emails—of fraternal twins Harry and Matilda Goodman as they fumble into adulthood, telling lies and keeping secrets, and finally confronting their complicated twinship.
Matilda Goodman is an underemployed wedding photographer grappling with her failure to live as an artist and the very bad lie she has told her boyfriend (that she has a dead twin). Harry, her (totally alive) brother, is an untenured professor of literature, anxiously contemplating his publishing status (unpublished) and sleeping with a student. When Matilda invites her boyfriend home for Thanksgiving to meet the family, and when Harry makes a desperate—and unethical—move to save his career, they set off an avalanche of shame, scandal, and drunken hot tub revelations that force them to examine the truth about who they really are. A wonderfully subversive, sensitive novel of romantic entanglement and misguided ambition, Hey Harry, Hey Matilda is a joyful look at love and family in all its forms.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her debut novel, Hulin explores the complicated relationship between 32-year-old fraternal twins, Harry and Matilda Goodman, through their email correspondence. Matilda is an eccentric Brooklyn-based wedding photographer, and Harry is an English professor at a Connecticut university hoping to publish and procure tenure. The content of their emails spans their daily experiences, worries about the future, and memories. They share secrets Matilda admits that she told her boyfriend that her twin had died; Harry confides in her after making an unethical move in his career while avoiding other secrets. Their messages are often laugh-out-loud funny, as when Matilda recounts the weddings she photographs, and when they forward each other emails from their philosophizing, self-absorbed father. As the siblings meander through various topics, some messages seem superfluously detailed; however, this slowly leads to a disclosure that puts their correspondence into a different light. Visual cues seem integral to Hulin's project Matilda illustrates feelings with diagrams, and photographs separate each section. Though the narrative is constrained by the epistolary form, even when the twins prompt each other to write a scene "like a movie" or "like a story," the book is an entertaining caper and a thought-provoking look at family, memory, and the complexities of love.
