When Paul Miller’s pharmaceutical company goes public,
making his family IPO millionaires, his wife, Janice, is
sure this is the windfall she’s been waiting years for —
until she learns, via messengered letter, that her husband
is divorcing her (for her tennis partner!) and cutting her
out of the new fortune. Meanwhile, four hundred miles south
in Los Angeles, the Millers’ older daughter, Margaret, has
been dumped by her newly famous actor boyfriend and left in
the lurch by an investor who promised to revive her
fledgling post-feminist magazine, Snatch. Sliding
toward bankruptcy and dogged by creditors, she flees for
home where her younger sister Lizzie, 14, is struggling with
problems of her own. Formerly chubby, Lizzie has been
enjoying her newfound popularity until some bathroom
graffiti alerts her to the fact that she’s become the school
slut.
The three Miller women retreat behind the walls
of their Georgian colonial to wage battle with divorce
lawyers, debt collectors, drug-dealing pool boys, mean
girls, country club ladies, evangelical neighbors, their own
demons, and each other, and in the process they become
achingly sympathetic characters we can’t help but root for,
even as the world they live in epitomizes everything wrong
with the American Dream. Exhilarating, addictive, and
superbly accomplished, All We Ever Wanted Was
Everything crackles with energy and intelligence and
marks the debut of a knowing and very funny novelist, wise
beyond her years.
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