Amazon.com Review
Cathleen Schine, the author of
The Love Letter, takes on the "sandwich generation" in her tale of three mothers,
She Is Me. Regal, cranky Lotte is the matriarch of the trio, mother to Greta and grandmother to Elizabeth (who also has a child of her own). All three points of view are presented in the novel, as each of the women struggles with her personal demons: Lotte has a quickly spreading skin cancer, Greta also has cancer and is beginning to question her heterosexuality, and Elizabeth has uprooted her life to write a doomed screenplay based on
Madame Bovary. While the trepidations they face are daunting, Schine keeps the tone light and humorous throughout, capturing the complicated nature of mother/daughter relationships--specifically the peculiar way in which they can loathe and love each other at the exact same moment.
Though the alternating perspectives are ostensibly meant to bring depth to the story, in this case it most often results in confusion. Segments shift from one woman's view to another's all too quickly, forcing readers to spend the first several sentences of each section figuring out whose mind we are in. This choppy style also makes it difficult to care about any one woman in particular. Also distracting from what could otherwise be a compelling story are the external characters, which are either superfluous or underdeveloped. Much like Elizabeth's screenplay, this tale doesn't represent the writer's best work. --Brangien Davis
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Schine (The Love Letter; The Evolution of Jane) takes a refreshing and often very funny look at love, aging and loyalty in the complicated lives of three women in a tight-knit family. Assistant professor Elizabeth Bernard moves to Los Angeles with her live-in boyfriend, Brett, and their three-year-old son, Harry, after a paper she wrote on Madame Bovary ("The Way Madame Bovary Lives Now: Tragedy, Farce and Cliche in the Age of Ikea") catches the eye of a hotshot studio head, who hires her to write the screenplay for an updated version of Flaubert's classic. Also living in L.A. are her grandmother, Lotte, a sharp-talking sometime actress whose aging but still beautiful skin is now marred by a cancerous tumor, and her mother, Greta, a garden designer with a lackluster marriage and a recent diagnosis of colon cancer. Elizabeth quickly finds herself beleaguered by competing demands: her sick mother and grandmother, "now drifting just out of her reach, her grandmother toward death, her mother toward uncertainty"; her sweet, needy son; her husband Brett's insistence that she marry him; her problematic screenplay. Greta, meanwhile, develops a surprising crush on Daisy Peperino, the director with whom Elizabeth is collaborating, and Lotte tries to come to terms with her own imminent death. Schine deftly mixes humor and pathos as she explores these women's various challenges. Elizabeth, especially, grapples with adultery, passion and grief, like Flaubert's heroine, but this sweet novel has none of the French classic's darkness. Instead, it's clever, charming and even uplifting, as Elizabeth learns that love and family are "farcical only from the outside and tragic only when they ended" and that forgiveness is always possible.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
