Use Me: Fiction [Paperback]

Elissa Schappell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 6, 2001

The exquisitely artful fiction debut of Vanity Fair columnist Elissa Schappell is a novel told in ten stories that resonate with the most profound experiences in the life of a young woman -- friendship and rivalry, the love for a man, the birth of a child, and the death of a father.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Elissa Schappell's first novel is so brilliant it practically gives you a suntan. Actually, it's really 10 linked stories that imply a novel, like Melissa Banks's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, only more literary. (Banks was a clever ad copywriter; Schappell is a veteran of Vanity Fair, The Paris Review, and Tin House.) Use Me tells the life story of a daddy's girl named Evelyn, from her teenage trip to France with her parents and kid sister, through her wild youth and her dad's long battle with cancer, right up to her metamorphosis into a mother of a 2-year-old son who adores vintage punk rock and is slow to give up nursing.

Schappell has a gift for alert first-person narrative, sardonic humor, nuanced sex scenes, child characters as lifelike as (and less sentimental than) Salinger's, and tense conversations that quiver like crossed fencing foils. The book is rife with piercing insights and illuminating turns of phrase. Peering into a loved one's urn, the orally oriented Evie observes that "the bits of burned white bone look like miniature marshmallows in pale cocoa." Her stressed-out mom "looks as breakable as a dime-store comb." A 16-year-old Catholic schoolgirl awaiting her third abortion notices the clinic's "bus-station furniture designed to cause discomfort," the "disco effect" of a flickering fluorescent tube overhead, and inside the light, the "dead flies, all on their backs, legs up and crossed."

The schoolgirl is Evie's best friend, Mary Beth, who narrates Schappell's second-best story, "Novice Bitch," which concerns Mary Beth's post-abortion bonding experience with her mom at a traumatizing dog show. It's poignant and painful--Schappell's favorite emotional cocktail. Mary Beth also comes alive in "The Garden of Eden," which evokes the girls' boho idyll in Amsterdam. But for most of the book, she is sketchy, and little exists beyond the struggles of Evie, her doting and imperiled father, and her lovingly troublesome mother. Evie's husband, sister, and the odd lover are fine as far as they go, which isn't far. There's supposed to be an ongoing subtext about Mary Beth's rivalry for Evie's dad's affections--Mary Beth's father is emotionally AWOL with increasingly younger wives--but Schappell doesn't pull it off. She's better at contrasting the girls' erotic strategies: Mary Beth goes for it, while "Evie thinks it perfectly acceptable to get completely naked with a man and then say, 'Oh, let's just kiss.'"

Two things in Use Me stick with you: the deadly accuracy of the family grief scenes and the enchanted account of Evie's (and Mary Beth's) adolescence. Despite a few flaws, this is an electrifying debut. Elissa Schappell is the genuine article. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

At the center of Schappell's first novel, which consists of 10 interconnected stories, is Evie Wakefield and her journey from passionate adolescence to marriage and children. Along for the ride is Evie's troubled best friend, Mary Beth McEvoy, who almost steals the novel with her own story, "Novice Bitch." Evie's relationships with men--her father, her boyfriends, and finally her husband and son--drive the action. Schappell broadens her scope with an examination of Evie's family life during her father's fight with cancer. The adolescent Evie and Mary Beth are much more interesting than their adult counterparts. Schappell does well in showing the sexual yearnings and desires of the two girls, but as they grow into womanhood, the characters fall into a rut that Schappell can't get them out of. This novel's independent short stories are like snapshots in a photo album that come together to reveal the stages of a life, gaps and unexpected leaps included. Michelle Kaske --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (March 6, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060959606
• ISBN-13: 978-0060959609
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #317,974 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I wish I could give this more stars!, March 7, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Use Me (Hardcover)

Anyone who read and loved Girls' Guide by Melissa Banks absolutely must read this book today! Schappell takes the short stories, recurring characters format and perfects it, making our interaction with her main characters personal and enduring. You will not be able to wait to find out what happens with her father and princess best friend Mary Beth. The best book out in 2000 so far!

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Use Me is a book about life, April 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Use Me (Hardcover)

Use Me is not a book about death, but, on the contrary, a book about the very essence of life. Schappell dares the reader to look at what really happens in relationships between men and women, between friends, in the very fabric of family life itself. Use Me, despite appearances,is a feminist book of the first order. It does not offer characters for women to blindly model themselves after, but instead, challenges women to question how power is asserted with men, family members, and within friendships. Use Me pushes, provokes, and jostles the reader into a relationship with the book -- one filled with emotion, joy and horror -- at the end of the book, it is hard to let that "relationship" go.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Short Story Snapshots Create an Album Full of Meaning, May 23, 2000

By 

John Espinosa - See all my reviews

This review is from: Use Me (Hardcover)

Schappell's series of short stories link together to tell a whole story of love and loss, of rebellion and communion. Schappell is hip. Reading her is like talking to the New York teenage sex queen she writes about, (the Mary Beth "best friend" character) who is more experienced and knowing than you are - and ultimately less emotionally engaged with her own experiences. In contrast is the main character Evie who is so overwhelmed with her own feelings she draws us into every experience the short stories describe: making out with a French boy on vacation while her nearby parents taste wine; her crush of feeling as her father eventually loses his roller coaster ride with cancer; her sickness at learning of her best friend has shared a moment with her father that she never could; her aloof awareness of her own husband's straying. The stories start the two characters in their early teens and keep moving until until they are young, married parents. This is a feeling book and it read like a series of moments the author had lived again and again and again: imagery, the sort that is seared into the psyche at an important life's moment conveys the feeling present here efficiently. With more filler this book might have been a novel but I am glad for it's economy - the format is perfect for the exploration of everything that's intense about Evie's experience becoming and being an adult. I don't really agree with criticism of her obsession with her father, or her treatment of her children. In this book Evie comes to terms with the fragility of life and all the ties that bind are affected by this knowledge. Is Evie's life, as told here, relevant to human experience? Certainly.