Olivia Morten is perfect. Maybe she's constantly hungry, but her body is to die for. Maybe her high-flying publicist job has taken over her life, but her clients are L.A.'s hottest celebrities. Maybe her husband is never around, but he is a drop-dead-gorgeous doctor. And maybe her past harbors an incredibly embarrassing secret, but no one remembers high school & right? When Ben Dunn, Olivia's high school arch nemesis and onetime crush, suddenly resurfaces, all of her hard-won perfection begins to unravel. As she finds herself dredging up long-suppressed memories, she is forced to confront the most painful truth of all: sometimes who we become isn't who we really are.
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Liza Palmer is one of my favorite women's fiction authors. Lately, unfortunately, a lot of the quirkiness that made books like Nowhere But Home and A Field Guide to Burying Your Parents so rewarding has been exorcised from her writing. From the minute former fat girl turned skinny, successful publicist Olivia Morten runs into her old nemesis/crush Ben Dunn in the first chapter of The F Word, you know that the careful facade she has constructed for the past twenty years will crack like an eggshell. She'll have to confront some painful truths about the shallow superficial persona she has carefully constructed before she has a chance to be truly happy, including embracing some of the Fat Girl qualities she has denied for years.
Getting there is still an interesting journey, thanks to Palmer's skills at characterization and dialogue. With the story set in southern California she has plenty of opportunities to skewer our obsession with celebrity gossip, especially how easily our judgement of other women turns from positive to negative (and back again). I really appreciated Olivia's close relationship with her mother and her mother's two best friends, who are portrayed as real women, not caricatures of wacky senior citizens. I wish the book had been a little bit longer – I wanted to know more about Olivia's past, including how and when she lost the weight, as well as how she became a successful publicist.
In the author's acknowledgments, Palmer says that this book came about because her publisher had passed on her latest book proposal, causing her to throw a Hail Mary and pitch the plot for The F Word. I'm curious about the rejected book, and wonder if it had a more unusual plot (like a woman finding her calling cooking for men on death row in Nowhere But Home) that was deemed too far from the mainstream. Maybe she can self publish it someday – I bet it would have been even more interesting than this one.
I received a copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.
