Some women shop. Some eat. Dora cures the blues by bingeing
on books—reading one after another, from Flaubert to bodice
rippers, for hours and days on end. In this wickedly funny
and sexy literary debut, we meet the beguiling, beautiful
Dora, whose unique voice combines a wry wit and
vulnerability as she navigates the road between reality and
fiction.
Dora, named after Eudora Welty, is an
indiscriminate book junkie whose life has fallen apart—her
career, her marriage, and finally her self-esteem. All she
has left is her love of literature, and the book benders she
relied on as a child. Ever since her larger-than-life father
wandered away and her book-loving, alcoholic mother was left
with two young daughters, Dora and her sister, Virginia,
have clung to each other, enduring a childhood filled with
literary pilgrimages instead of summer vacations. Somewhere
along the way Virginia made the leap into the real world.
But Dora isn’t quite there yet. Now she’s coping with a
painful separation from her husband, scraping the bottom of
a dwindling inheritance, and attracted to a seductive
book-seller who seems to embody all that literature has to
offer—intelligent ideas, romance, and an escape from her
problems.
Joining Dora in her odyssey is an elderly
society hair-brusher, a heartbroken young girl, a hilarious
off-the-wall female teamster, and Dora’s mother, now on the
wagon, trying to make amends. Along the way Dora faces some
powerful choices. Between two irresistible men. Between
idleness and work. And most of all between the joy of
well-chosen words and the untidiness of real people and real
life.
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