Description

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A wicked stepmother finds her ideal prey in Carlone Blackwood's “quite brilliant” (The Times) debut.

A lavish Upper West Side apartment is the site of a familial cold war about to enter a phase of dangerous escalation.

J is a lonely woman without even the luxury of being alone. Her husband has fled to Paris with his latest flame, but he’s left J not only with their own four-year-old daughter, Sally Ann, but with the sulky cake-mix addicted, thirteen-year-old Renata, a leftover from his previous marriage. The presence of a pert au pair, Monique, serves only to make J feel more isolated and self-conscious. What she’d like is someone to blame.

Writing letters in her head to imaginary friends, J delights in dwelling on the hapless Renata, who “invites a kind of cruelty.” This is an invitation J fully intends to take up—and like so many stepmothers before her, she will find that wickedness, once indulged, is a difficult habit to kick. A mordant black splinter of a book, Caroline Blackwood’s first novel stands as proof positive of her eternal mastery—and mockery—of the darkest depths of human feeling.

About the Author

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Caroline Blackwood (1931–1996) was born into an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family and was famous for much of her life largely on account of her flamboyantly bohemian existence, not to mention her tumultuous marriages to the painter Lucian Freud, the pianist and composer Israel Citkowitz, and the poet Robert Lowell. Taking up writing in middle age, she soon demonstrated that hers was a mind as brilliant and ruthless as any of the men for whom she’d served as “muse,” producing reportage, fiction, biography, and even a cookbook.

Heidi Julavits is the author of four critically acclaimed novels and is co-editor, with Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes. She’s a founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Manhattan, where she teaches at Columbia University.

Praise For…

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“Contained and ferocious, at once disarmingly and ambiguously candid about blistering feelings which are made to seem commonplace and all the more frightening for that.”
— Jane Miller

“Caroline the pessimist made the world a happier place to be in because she could make mocking music of its terrors.”
— Jonathan Raban

“Blackwood is ‘an expert analyst of female fury,’ an outlook which is tempered by her deliciously dark sense of humour. She utilises black comedy as a means to engage with stories of the shocking difficulties faced by women and girls . . . Despite being a ‘savagely original’ voice and an irrepressible talent, Caroline Blackwood remains inexcusably neglected . . . Caroline Blackwood deserves to stand as a northern fiction author on par with her southern contemporary Edna O’Brien.”
— Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado

“One of the greatest, darkest writers who ever lived . . .  Her books are concise, mordant essays on evil . . . Blackwood’s magnificent works are like pure odes to odium, her prose cuttingly matter-of-fact . . . Blackwood’s works delve deeply into complicated, ugly relationships between women, something that is especially fascinating when the author herself was defined throughout her lifetime by her marriages to high-profile men."
— Virginia Feito

"Relentless, concise and funny . . . Caroline Blackwood is an expert analyst of female fury."
— The Observer

“Blackwood's macabre humor teases out the farcical aspects of human behavior at its most awkward and unmanageable, addressing outrageous situations with glacial detachment and overtones of Gothic dread. ‘The worst that could happen,’ in Blackwood's fiction, is what is always happening, and from a certain perspective, always, horribly, hilarious.”
— Gary Indiana

"Domesticity for Miss Blackwood has never been cozy; she listens for the ticking of the time bomb in the teapot."
 
— Carolyn Geiser

“A relentless, concise and (actually) funny book, one that you might put next to Edna O’Brien.”
— Lorna Sage

“Witty, observant, clever, an unusual entertainment—and something more besides.”
— Robert Nye