Recently recovered from a catastrophic car accident, fashion model Charlotte Swenson returns to life in Manhattan. Her beautiful face conceals eighty titanium screws that hold together her shattered bones. Charlotte, now unrecognizable to those who knew her before the accident, begins to float invisibly away from her former life and into an ephemeral world of fashion nightclubs and Internet projects, where image and reality blur. "Look at Me" is both a satire of our image-obsessed times and a mystery of human identity. Jennifer Egan illuminates the difficulties of shaping an inner life in a culture preoccupied with surfaces and asks whether 'truth' can have any meaning in an era when reality itself has become a style.Written with a masterful intelligence and grace, "Look at Me" establishes Jennifer Egan as one of the most daring and gifted novelists of her generation. 'The plot is a glorious and intricate mechanism, but it is Egan's style that ignites the imagination. Her prose is balanced, evocative and beautiful. And her underlying interest in the nature of self, image and reality permeates this sardonic and forceful work' - "Daily Telegraph". 'Bitingly intelligent satire on American celebrity culture' - "Independent". 'A parody of the self-discovery novel, it's an intelligent, gripping read about the manipulation of the individual' - "Time Out".
Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago, where her paternal grandfather was a police commander and bodyguard for President Truman during his visits to that city. She was raised in San Francisco and studied at the University of Pennsylvania and St. John's College, Cambridge, in England. In those student years she did a lot of traveling, often with a backpack: China, the former USSR, Japan, much of Europe, and those travels became the basis for her first novel, The Invisible Circus, and her story collection, Emerald City. She came to New York in 1987 and worked an array of wacky jobs while learning to write: catering at the World Trade Center; joining the word processing pool at a midtown law firm; serving as the private secretary for the Countess of Romanones, an OSS spy-turned-Spanish countess (by marriage), who wrote a series of bestsellers about her spying experiences and famous friends.
Egan has published short stories in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta and McSweeney's. Her first novel, The Invisible Circus, came out in 1995 and was released as a movie starring Cameron Diaz in 2001. Her second novel, Look at Me, was a National Book Award Finalist in 2001, and her third, The Keep, was a national bestseller. Also a journalist, Egan has written many cover stories for the New York Times Magazine on topics ranging from young fashion models to the secret online lives of closeted gay teens. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and her 2008 story on bipolar children won an Outstanding Media Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.
Photo credit Pieter M. Van Hattem
