Pink Slip [Paperback]

Rita Ciresi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 28, 1999

Lisa Diodetto's mother may be ready for her to get married but Lisa isn't.

At her sister's wedding she ducks when the bridal bouquet comes floating her way, and the only "eligible bachelor" in Lisa's life is her beloved gay cousin, Dodie.

Ditching her life as an underpaid, oversexed publishing drone in Manhattan, Lisa takes a lucrative spot at a more conservative company, and begins writing--on company time--a novel that pokes fun at corporate life.

Enter Lisa's main character: her new boss, Eben Strauss. A man of manners and caution, Strauss manages to bring out the best bad girl in Lisa. And before they know it, two very different people from two very different worlds are doing the one thing you should never do at the office: falling in love.

In her funny, familiar, heartbreaking new novel, the award-winning author of Blue Italian weaves a tale of family, work, sex, and love--and of all the things we try to leave behind but never really can. . . .

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

New York editorial jobs, especially entry-level ones, can be a drag. Lisa Diodetto, the twentysomething narrator of Rita Ciresi's Pink Slip, is well aware of this, having had her fill of dismal manuscripts and pitiful paychecks. So Lisa gives up on the supposed romance of publishing, ditching her job for a corporate position in a leafy suburb somewhere along the Hudson, where she edits things such as brochures and correspondences for Boorman Pharmaceuticals. The problem is that Lisa is a hot-blooded Italian American girl whose best friend is her gay cousin, Dodie. Even as she wants to shed their old ways--pot smoking and a shared habit of dating no-good men--she doesn't exactly try to integrate into corporate culture.

Lisa's skirts are on the too-short side, she uses office hours to work on a sex-filled novel about corporate life, and she starts dating someone in senior management. He, Eben Strauss, is Jewish and straight-laced--a foil to Lisa's naughty Catholic-girl persona. On a date to West Point, she notices that "Strauss wore a pair of tortoise shell prescription glasses that made me want to jump him. As he carefully inspected the foldout map of the grounds we picked up at the visitors' information center, I speculated whether he always took his glasses off before he moved in for the kill, or if he had even been so swept away he left them on through the entire act." Needless to say, Strauss wants to visit West Point's chapels while Lisa wants to view the cadets.

Lisa likes to think that she doesn't want to be the baby-hungry wife that her older, married sister has become. But the fact is that she craves a husband and a home and eventually a kid as much as her ordinary Italian relatives do. What makes Pink Slip appealing is the way in which Rita Ciresi shows how Lisa juggles her modern aspirations and Old World desires. It's a tricky tightrope to walk. --Katherine Alberg --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A young woman's intraoffice, interfaith love affair collides with her devotion to her Italian-American family in another wise-cracking, romantic novel from Flannery O'Connor Award winner Ciresi. As in her Blue Italian, the protagonists in a problematical romance are an Italian woman and a Jewish man. Second-generation Sicilian Lisa Diodetto has just turned a mouthy 25 and shucked her job in New York and her rat-infested apartment in Brooklyn to take the improbable position of assistant manager in the editorial division of Boorman Pharmaceuticals, in Ossining, N.Y. There, she promptly falls in love with her available, rather uptight boss, Eben Strauss, who turns out to be the descendant of Holocaust survivors whose stories are in a collection of interviews Lisa has edited. Meanwhile, Lisa is working on her own work, Stop It Some More, a graphic corporate novel. The "excerpt" from the interviews offers a snippet of Ciresi's writing at its finest?thoughtful and lyrical. The novel, Lisa admits, is often "artificially witty," and, alas, Ciresi's believable but uneven romance too often merits this same description. The chain-of-command and divergent background problems of Lisa and Eben ring true and cliche-free. What drives the big wedge between them is a crisis involving Lisa's beloved gay cousin, Dodie, that reminds the reader how long ago the book's time frame?1985?really is. Author tour. (Jan.) FYI: Pink Slip won the 1997 Pirate's Alley Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Delta (December 28, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385323638
• ISBN-13: 978-0385323635
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (80 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,458,408 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rita Ciresi is the author of four award-winning novels and two short-story collections. Visit her website at www.ritaciresi.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A wonderfully well-written romantic escape novel., March 12, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Pink Slip (Paperback)

A great escape novel that I was glad to have read after completing a rigorous and exhausting 3-month work assignment. I completely escaped reality! The book is engrossing. Initially, I was taken aback by the lusty and obscene language, but it certainly set the stage for the plot and characters development. Ms. Ciresi captured the essence and tradeoffs of life and all the issues and subissues intertwined therein. This includes: living in the city compared to the suburbs, the workplace job/career struggle, mother/daughter/sister ties, religious paradoxes, and most of all the complexities in making an unconventional male-female relationship work. Ms. Ciresi's subtle and not so subtle humor made me laugh out loud. I even had tears at times and found myself turning to my husband to tell him the "latest" Lisa event. It's definitely an adult-theme novel and not one for everyone. However, if you enjoy racy, funny books you will enjoy this one of a hardy young American woman (raised as an Italian Catholic) attemting to conquer her real and fictional demons.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hilariously funny and irresistibly sexy!, August 13, 2000

By 

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This review is from: Pink Slip (Paperback)

I have heard that Rita Ciseri is this era's Jane Austen. She writes books that are both romantic and funny. Well, I don't know if she has what it takes to become this era's Jane Austen, but she has written a very funny and romantic book.

Lisa Diodetto's mother wants her to be married. She is constantly reminded that time is of the essence. But Lisa couldn't be happier living a single life, that is until she meets Eben Strauss -- a straight-laced Jewish man who happens to be Lisa's boss at a pharmaceutical firm. Lisa, whose Italian family is Catholic, is faced with a dilemma. Will her family approve of the relationship? Also, she has kept secrets from her mother, like the abortion she had years ago. There are some incredibly funny and sexy moments in this novel.

This novel is extremely well written and emotional. Ciseri has a way with words. And she has indeed written a beautiful love story that captured me. I have only one objection: the fact that there are too many subplots. It was confusing and seemed misguided at times. But other than that, this book is great. I highly recommend it.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a delightful read!, June 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Pink Slip (Hardcover)

I'm female graduate student in a physics-related subject. Unfortunately I am pretty disillusioned by men (seen too many weirdos in my field!) and also by most fiction written for women (too wordy and/or banal). However, I was so riveted by this wonderful book that I played hooky from the lab for an entire day to stay home and read it. I could write a lot about the quirky heroine and her sweetly irreverent cousin Dodie, but the book is worth reading mainly because of the character of Eben Strauss. He's definitely on the endangered species list - gentle, moral, considerate, loving as well as professionally successful. I am not ashamed to say that I was touched to the point of tears. (for the record, "The Bridges of Madison County" didn't have the same effect on me.) Although the author has drawn upon several stereotypes, the clever dialog paints the characters as eminently REAL, 3-D people. Hope to see more books by the author.