Customer Reviews

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and devoured it in as few sittings as possible. It is the kind of book that, for me, has too many extraordinary plot twists and character traits to seem completely realistic, but the writing was so good that I was prepared to suspend belief and just go with the story.

The novel begins with Pippa Lee at 50 years old, married to a man 30 years her senior, and moving into a retirement complex. The first part of the book describes her current life, focussing on her relationship with her husband and two adult children. The second part goes back to Pippa's childhood and charts her wild and self-destructive youth up until she meets her husband and changes her life. The final portion of the book returns to the present day, where all is not right between Pippa and her family, and things have reached breaking point.

I found Pippa to be an interesting if not always likeable character. She seemed to drift through life, easily influenced by others, with little conviction about what she wanted or with any kind of moral compass. Despite this, I liked Pippa. I felt she was very much a product of her childhood and was just a confused, lonely person at heart. I was also interested by a lot of the secondary characters and enjoyed how the author managed to perfectly sum up their personalities in just a few piercing descriptive sentences or lines of dialogue.

Perhaps the one false note was the ending. Part of me feels that the loose ends were all tied up too neatly, within just a few pages, and perhaps the book could have gone on a bit longer to make the ending more realistic. Furthermore, there was also something that happened near the end of the book that just didn't ring true. I won't give too much away, suffice to say that there was almost a metaphysical element to the ending that I found unsatifying.

Overall, I have to give this book 5 stars because it is an intelligent, sensitive novel, and also a real page turner. Who could ask for anything more?

Perhaps I've read too many other novels about women from the classics Hester Prynne and Madame Bovary to Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Tyler and Sue Miller's modern women to be overly impressed by the short shrift Miller gives her Pippa.

So, we all change as we mature. Daughter of a dysfunctional mother, she becomes a rebellious teenager. Surprise. Not enough supervision by her aunt, she is corrupted by a predatory older woman. Surprise surprise. When she falls into the New York drug crowd, one might wonder why the influence of her Episcopalian pastor father and dislike for her dexedrine-addicted mother don't have any influence on that choice.

But all goes well after she falls in love with a married man 30-yrs. her senior and has twins and hunkers down as a wife and mother for the next 30 yrs. Why? That question is not quite answered. Except that I guess she was pretty normal all along except for the angst of young adulthood. This is all told in flashback.

Now open the novel with Pippa and 80 yr. old husband Herb deciding to move into a retirement community that doesn't quite agree with Pippa. Except that isn't explained too well either, considering Herb's exceptional desire to stay young (with gusto). And except, as Pippa says, that Marigold Village, the retirement community, is like a fairy tale, where you enter, and something happens to you like children meeting a witch. Well, something bad does happen to her, but, again (surprise) like a fairy tale all ends well because, after all, Pippa was just pretty normal to begin with anyway. I guess.

The last sentence is one of the few bits of insight we have into Pippa's human condition, and it's doesn't amount to much for a novel that had the potential to be more. But it allows her to neatly walk out of the dark woods of Marigold Village with a pithy little platitude.

I picked this up in the airport looking for a good holiday read. I was briefly engaged in the beginning with the descriptions of the retirement village and the character of Pippa Lee. But the shift to PIppa's younger self and her forays into sex, drugs, love triangles, the literary scene, mother/daughter angst, etc. was really disappointing. None of the characters are believable or have any depth at all. Pippa just floats from one crisis to another - affair with teacher, sex clubs, too many drugs, lover's ex-wife blowing her brains out - with a minimum of introspection or even realisation and change. The ending is ludicrous and all neatly wrapped up - just like in the movies.
The author either can't help herself and writes like it's a screenplay or that was what she intended all along and so didn't bother to make it a fully rounded novel with real people.
On a good note, she does portray the mother-daughter relationship quite well in parts. I think more of that with real emotion and conflict could have made this a good book.

It was the end of the summer, I wanted a light read and I heard about this book while reading about the making of it as a movie starring Robin Wright Penn in MORE magazine. The writing style was reminiscent of early Steve Martin books. That part drew me in and I was enthralled. The other reviews have told you the plot so I won't go there but it did read like it was yearning to be a screenplay as the writer had some great one liners a la Carrie Fisher style. I wanted to know more about why Herb was attracted to Pippa, how their marriage was sustained for all those years especially with Pippa's history.
Furthermore, something else didn't add up, literally. Herb was supposed to be 80. At one point, Pippa alluded to his first marriage where he was married for 30 years, then 7 to the nut job and then his life with Pippa. Did Herb get married the first time at 15 years old? This did not make sense to me at all. Also, it jumped from her past back to the Marigold retirement home, present life too abruptly. It was as if Rebecca Miller wanted to finish up. There wasn't enough of a transition here. Also, I wanted to know more about what was going on inside Pippa's head during her marriage and during the Marigold years. Did she feel like she was faking it? It could have used another 50 pages of feeling on both of their parts. What did Herb and Pippa think of one another, what did they think at all. Was a retirement home with all the same houses, with all similar roads symbolic of the day to day, rote direction that life takes after so many years together. I wanted more. Perhaps the movie will bring that.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book for many reasons. It offered insight to a woman who seems a little lost in her own life, being married to a successful man many years her senior and whose children are grown and gone. She fills her day doing mundane chores but seems to enjoy the monotony more for what it shelters her from than for what it is. We learn over the course of the book that Pippa was raised by a drug addicted mother and ran away from home because of that only to herself succumb to a downward spiral of drugs and aimlessness. It wasn't until she met the much married Herb, a man 30 years her senior, that she stops taking drugs and becomes a stable wife and mother.
The raw intelligence of the prose is what moved me. Miller is hugely talented and some lines literally left me reeling. One is when Pippa's daughter, Grace, at a very young age said to her mother "I own you as far as the eye can see." Such statements cause Pippa to remove herself from her daughter's clutches a little, an act of tough love or selfishness? There are many questions like this that this book surreptitiously poses that made it a thought provoking delight.

I'm not sure what convinced me to read this book, especially after seeing a three star cumulative review on Amazon. Whatever it was, I am really glad I did. I don't typically read a lot of contemporary fiction--more of a classics or non-fiction reader. The prose was readable and engaging. I found myself up until the wee hours finishing it up because I was interested to know what Pippa would do (or had done) next. While I doubt there are many people who can relate to the specifics of the protagonist's life and travails, if you look beyond the literal, the story becomes very relatable. It was interesting to see the several parallels the various characteres lives took and it really drove home the point that we often become or do the things we most despise in others. Thought provoking.

I enjoyed the first half of the book. I really wanted to learn more about her relationship with her daughter and I wanted to know more about her life going forward from age 50.

Instead, it went from a good read to Pretty Woman (when she met her husband), then Stepford Wives, then to a disappointing ending. How is she condescending to Moira when she took Herb from someone else which ended in utter (over the top) tragedy?

Her relationship with her daughter deserved more attention. Herb fizzled out into a one dimensional character as did the son. It's like the story went up in smoke as though the writer just stopped caring. So did I.

This is a perfect story who are looking for a good quality read with some soft life philosphy.The book has two major points;
- one is about Pippa; the perfect wife of an 80 year old power guy; a mother of two who did her best in raising her kids by basically providing them a good family life. Now she is 50, kids are not at home and don't even appreciate her much..she still has a long life infront of her and feels drowned with the suburban life of her now 80 years old husband. And her old "fun and risk taking" character starts to come to surface again...the reason why her husband first place fell in love with her...

- then with the flachbacks we learn more about Pippa...the young girl. Clever and who enjoys life..who is open to risks but still clever to choose to settle at a certain time...a perfect mold, isn't it ?

I do recommend this book especially to women who have at one time stopped being that young crazy fun loving risk taking irresponsible and thus sexy girl and turned into a responsible wife and mother. There is something for all of us in this story.

A very good story and good reading :)

I read an excerpt of this book for an on-line bookclub and thought it sounded great. I placed on my list to get from the library and moved it up when I saw it was being turned into a movie! All I can say is YUCK! The character of Pippa is so likeable to begin with but then you find out about her childhood and a drug-addicted mother and her descent into the underworld of the city only to be rescued by an extremely weathy man. It was totally unrealistic and incredibly boring. I cannot imagine what the movie would be like. Also, the copy I read had the original cover and it was quite possibly the worst cover I have ever seen. Had I found it at the bookstore, I would never buy it based on the cover. Please don't waste your time reading this book.

When I heard this book was going to be a movie, I moved it to the top of my to be read list. The book description had me smiling and I was looking forward to getting to know Pippa Lee a little better.

Fifty-year-old Pippa lives a contented life with her much older husband, Herb. However, everything changes when Herb announces that they are leaving Manhattan for a retirement community. Unsettled in her new home, Pippa begins sleepwalking through life--literally. She catches herself on a security camera cooking and eating while unconscious, then finds evidence that her somnambulist self has taken up smoking. In light of her erratic behavior, Pippa reconsiders the life she has built for herself and the example she is setting for her two grown children: raised by a pill-addicted mother, Pippa ran away from home at 17 and struggled with drugs, abusive relationships and her own feelings of guilt before looking for redemption in the family that she now worries is falling apart.

I really suspected that I would find myself rooting for Pippa along the way, as I felt a small part of myself in her. Unfortunately, half way through the book, I found Pippa, and the book to be annoying, and I could not wait to finish it. I did not really enjoy the writing style, and the story line makes me think this one is more suited for the big screen than for the written word.