The Hazards of Sleeping Alone »

Elise Juska's short stories have appeared in many magazines, including The Hudson Review, Harvard Review, Salmagundi, Black Warrior Review, Calyx, and The Seattle Review. She teaches fiction writing at The New School in New York City and The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her first novel, Getting Over Jack Wagner, is available from Downtown Press.

Visit the author's website: www.elisejuska.com.

With her free-spirited daughter away at college and her "hip" ex-husband living across the country, Charlotte has grown used to being alone. For the most part, she prefers it. She relies on familiar routines: manicures, grocery shopping, game shows. But at night, no matter how hard she tries (and in spite of the Dream Machine her daughter Emily sent her) she can't stop her logical mind from running wild — imagining burglars, strange noises, and all manner of trouble that might befall her fearless daughter.

Having just graduated from Wesleyan with a pierced tongue and an arsenal of opinions, Emily has always been passionate about her beliefs — from mindfulness to vegetarianism to her new live-in boyfriend. Though Charlotte rarely understands her, she's learned to keep her doubts to herself. But when Emily and the new boyfriend arrive for a weekend visit, secrets are revealed that compel Charlotte to take a stand. Forced to examine her own life choices, she's about to learn she can't control everything. What she can do is open her heart to new possibilities, and to the fact that headstrong Emily might have a thing or two to teach them all.

Kirkus Reviews

Divorced mother, living in barely-there fashion, gets knocked for a loop when real life comes crashing in. It's hard to resist a good tale of emotional thaw about a closed-down soul who's reawakened to the messy highs and lows of the world outside some carefully structured sanctum. This helps explain the success of Juska's second outing (after Getting Over Robert Wagner, 2002) but doesn't completely cover it. Our frozen heroine is Charlotte, on the downhill side of her 40s and divorced for 15 years, living alone in a sterile New Jersey condo with strong-willed daughter Emily, in her early 20s and her mother's exact opposite. At the start, Charlotte is a nightmarish control freak (with family money to support her) who has little to occupy her days and so spends them in a strict regimen of small tasks: cleaning, running errands, getting manicures, watching Jeopardy every night without fail. Given her neuroses, the departures of Emily (first for college, then for a house in New Hampshire that she shares with her black boyfriend Walter) and the earlier one of husband Joe (for Seattle and a more glamorous wife) leave her free to develop a truly unhealthy set of routines and worries. Juska's portrait of her, though, is an exacting one and hews, however uncomfortably, close to the truth. Charlotte is every mother who wants nothing more than for her children to move back home, who secretly desires their misery in order to feel needed, and who takes every independent action by those same children as a rebuke of her values. There are neighborhoods full of Charlottes, and Juska's skill in portraying this one is strong enough that her latest is a powerful success in spite of its tendency tomelodrama: an unexpected pregnancy, a crisis over Walter's race, far too many heart-to-heart discussions. Mother-daughter fiction of the best flawed sort where, in the midst of cliche, a genuinely admirable amount of truth shines forth. Agent: Whitney Lee/The Fielding Agency