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Like the best works of Anne Tyler, Sue Miller, and Gail Godwin, The Doctor?s Daughter is private yet universal, luminous and revelatory?and marks the reemergence of a singular talent in American writing.
Ballantine
March 2006
272 pages
ISBN: 034548584X
Hardcover
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Fiction
In her first work of fiction in more than a decade,
award-winning novelist Hilma Wolitzer brilliantly renders
the intimate details of ordinary life and exposes a host of
hidden truths. The Doctor�s Daughter is a haunting portrait
of a woman coming to terms with her family history and the
fallibility of memory. One morning, Alice Brill awakes with a sudden awareness that
something is wrong. There�s a hollowness in her chest, and a
sensation of dread that she can�t identify or shake. Was it
something she�s done, or forgotten to do? As she scours her
mind for the source of her unease, she confronts an array of
disturbing possibilities. First, there is her marriage, a once vibrant relationship
that now languishes stasis. Then there�s her idle,
misdirected younger son, who always needs bailing out of
some difficulty. Or perhaps Alice�s trepidation is caused by
the loss of her career as an editor at a large publishing
house, and the new path she�s paved for herself as a
freelance book doctor. Or it might be the real doctor in her
life: her father. Formerly one of New York�s top surgeons,
he now rests in a nursing home, his mind gripped by
dementia. And the Eden that was Alice�s childhood�the
material benefits and reflected glory of being a successful
doctor�s daughter, the romance of her parents� famously
perfect marriage�makes her own domestic life seem fatally
flawed. While struggling to find the root of her restlessness, Alice
is buoyed by her discovery of a talented new writer, a man
who works by day as a machinist in Michigan. Soon their
interactions and feelings intensify, and Alice realizes that
the mystery she�s been trying to solve lies not in the
present, as she had assumed, but in the past�and in the
secrets of a marriage that was never as perfect as it appeared.
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