Beautiful Bodies : A Novel [Paperback]

Laura Shaine Cunningham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 4, 2003

Manhattan, the coldest night of the year -- six best friends rush to attend a celebration. Blown by wind and snow, the women arrive flushed, each caught in midadventure....

Tonight's the night of nights -- to rejoice in a new lover, leave an unfaithful husband, or decide to have a baby on one's own. These "six in the city" profes-sional women fight for their female choices. Sparks and zingers fly across the table....Love lives, secrets, and friendships go up in candle flame.

Who will win -- the romantics or the realists? How can working women triumph in such trying times? While the cell phones chime and the biological clocks rewind, the friends enact a timeless ceremony. Here is our urban "friends-as-family" generation -- Beautiful Bodies is a dazzling comedy of manners in the grand tradition of Dorothy Parker and Mary McCarthy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Cunningham's lively and amusing first novel, six women who have been friends for two decades gather together on the snowiest night of the year. All are on the cusp of 40; none has quite attained the aspirations she shared with her friends at 20. The party takes place at the downtown loft of journalist Jessie Girard, who may or may not have just met her soul mate, Native American lawyer Jesse Dark, and the occasion is a baby shower for unwed bohemian musician Claire Molinaro. The irony clear to all the women (who include Sue Carol, a still-aspiring actress, Lisbeth, a spaced-out painter and Nina, an overweight spa owner) is that Claire may be the only one who will fulfill their dreams of motherhood. Suspense gets built around three small but effective questions: will Jesse call Jessie tonight, as he promised? Will manipulative, materialistic Martha leave early to meet her lover at an expensive restaurant? Will the storm of the century destroy everybody's plans? Though the novel lacks the verve and surprising pathos of Cunningham's fine memoirs, Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country, the plot hums along spiritedly. Cunningham is overzealous, however, in detailing the possessions and tastes that indicate her protagonists' status, and her focus on describing numerous Manhattan neighborhoods contributes to the feeling of a book done by the numbers. On the plus side, the dialogue is witty and quintessentially feminine, the atmosphere changes as each character alters the group dynamics, and Cunningham's observant and funny social comedy carries the ring of truth.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Jessie, Sue Carol, Nina, Lisbeth, and Martha have come together to celebrate Claire's pregnancy. Some 20 years earlier, the women befriended one another at a boarding house in New York City, where they still live. Now in their mid-thirties to early forties, they have little in common beyond the bond their living arrangements created so many years ago. Much of Cunningham's novel, which was originally written as a play, takes place one evening in Jessie's loft while a blizzard descends on Manhattan. The interaction is strained because of Martha's penchant for criticism. Eventually, however, Martha reveals that all is not so perfect in her life either, allowing the women to comfort and be open with one another despite their differences. An appealing account of the enduring nature of friendship, this is recommended for large public libraries and wherever the author's memoirs (Sleeping Arrangements, A Place in the Country) are popular. Karen Core, Enoch Pratt Free Lib., Baltimore
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Washington Square Press (March 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743434021
• ISBN-13: 978-0743434027
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,237,723 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Laura Shaine Cunningham is the author of eight books, including the acclaimed memoirs, Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country which were first excerpted in The New Yorker magazine. She has also published the novels Sweet Nothings, Third Parties,Tamara (as L.C.Shaine), Beautiful Bodies, Dreams of Rescue and the YA novel The Midnight Diary of Zoya Blume. Her books have been published in ten foreign countries. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly and many literary quarterlies. She is also a playwright and her plays have been produced on the main stage at Steppenwolf Theater, on Theater Row in New York,also staged in Manhattan at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theater Club and Ensemble Studio Theatre and are extremely popular in Europe- she has many current international theater productions, in Russia, Bulgaria, Argentina, London, Estonia, Finland. Her plays are often anthologized and appear in many Best Plays of...including Best Plays of 2009-2010,Best Plays of 2007-8, and most preceding years' collections. In addition, her plays have been published in many Vintage collections, including Plays for Women, Leading Ladies, Take Ten, Take Ten II, Laugh Lines, Shorter, Faster, Funnier...and several of her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing- Beautiful Bodies, Bang, and Cruising Close to Crazy.
In addition, she is a journalist and has written many columns for The New York Times, The New York Observer, the London Times and magazine articles for Esquire, the Ladies Home Journal, Organic Living and other periodicals.She is also Artistic Director of the Memoir Institute ([e-mail], and lectures often on memoir and theater at universities and at literary festivals. She has won many awards for her writing, including two NEA Fellowships, in literature and theatre, and two NYFA awards in creative writing and play-writing. She is a member of HB Playwrights Foundation, and The Actors Studio Playwright Unit; she is also an alumna of New Dramatists. and Actors and Writers.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sheer brilliance...many facets to this diamond of a novel., June 24, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Beautiful Bodies : A Novel (Hardcover)

Men as well as women will love this scintillating, hilarious, yet moving story of six women friends who gather on one frigid night. This is incredibly candid, even sensual but never coarse. This is truly as unusual as the reviews indicate: a literate novel of women of the city and their deepest needs and feelings. My sister bought it and I borrowed it...We are quoting already...A soon to be classic of modern angst and love among the denizens of the dark heart of the asphalt jungle. New York ( and Every City) glitters, glowers and glows...I love these women, whose souls are as beautiful as their 'bodies"...A sensitive introspective yet funny book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Spirits more than bodies, March 18, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Beautiful Bodies : A Novel (Hardcover)

The six best friends of the title have, I think, more beautiful spirits than bodies. That's what makes them great -- they are not falsely glamorized. they are very real, especially to me. I am sure I know these women, maybe I am one -- the one who throws the dinner party and is not ready and throws her cellphone out the window rather than wait for her new guy to call! I identify! They are true human beings,with funny idiosynchrasies who make mistakes and their friendships wax and wane, through 15 years and the one night that is the setup for this EXTREMELY FUNNY NOVEL. I wish I was a writer so I could adequately explain how much I enjoyed this , how smart it is and how uplifted it made me feel about myself, my best friends, the men, the one nighters and even my ex-husband! This is humanity, at its best, the fact that it makes you howl and cry is a triumph. I personally thought Martha the funniest creation, Lisbeth the most enduring...I wanted to be there with them. This is the real book, Girlfriends. Don't miss it!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Maybe I need testosterone shots, December 28, 2002

By 

Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Beautiful Bodies : A Novel (Hardcover)

BEAUTIFUL BODIES by Laura Shaine Cunningham is a "chick book" that I normally wouldn't pick up on a bet. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the author's two previous volumes of memoirs, SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS and A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY, and we've exchanged emails of mutual admiration, so I bit down on my emery board and got on with it. Just between you and me, I'm glad I did. But I'm left wondering if I need testosterone replacement therapy.

The plot tells you right off that it's not a book for Real Men. Six female pals in their mid-30s living in New York gather at a private dinner party at the apartment of one to have a baby shower for another. Baby shower? Yikes!

Jessie, the hostess, is a successful journalist still in the post-coital afterglow of an affair out in Colorado with one of her subjects. Nina, a chronic dieter and the primary caregiver for her dying mother, owns a nail salon. Nina is also fresh off an afternoon tryst with someone she met in her apartment building's laundry room, a New Age Sensitive Fella who invited her up for herbal tea ("Celestial Seasonings"). Sue Carol, a waitress and struggling thespian with a substance abuse problem, has just left her adulterous husband. Sue Carol savors all the little dramas in her life - they'll make her a better actress. Lisbeth, an ethereal, anorexic artist/model pining after a lost (and married) lover, spends a significant portion of her energy staving off her landlord's efforts to evict her from her rent-controlled apartment. Martha, a real estate agent obsessed with her exorbitant earnings and the material goodies they buy, has meticulously planned to have a child with her fiance, but has just learned that she's sterile. And lastly, Claire, the mother-to-be. Claire is an independent, free-spirited musician - she plays the krummhorn - who's happily made a world for herself in an 18 by 20 foot room in a local residence for women. She's blissfully happy with her pregnancy and the prospect of being a single mother. The baby's father, a global wanderer, may never be seen again.

For me, the chief fascination of BEAUTIFUL BODIES was in watching the nuances and shifting dynamics of the relationships between the six women as they come together on a winter night to celebrate Claire's impending motherhood and share secrets. For example, Nina is the first to show up at Jessie's apartment. Later, Lisbeth is the second guest to arrive, and:

"When a third woman enters the room, it is clear which two women are the closer friends. Triangles always come to a point."

And still later, as the assembled group sits for dinner:

"The others had taken their places, as the (place) cards indicated .... The lines were drawn. The dull knives waited."

For me, a simple guy, this is potentially scary stuff. My two favorite players are Jessie and Martha. Jessie, who desperately tries to keep her party on track in the face of spoken anxieties and revealed confidences. Jessie, whose own angst is growing. (Her new lover did promise to call at 8:00 PM, didn't he? Was he turned off my her mastectomy scar?) And Martha, whose catty criticisms comprise a potential flamethrower in an atmosphere of volatile emotions.

BEAUTIFUL BODIES is a wonderful, poignant, funny, touchy-feely book totally unsuitable for a troglodytic male unless he wants a brief glimpse into the female psyche. Having just been there, I think I'll regain a masculine perspective by having a beer with the Boys. If they'll still admit me to the Clubhouse, that is.