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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 DoctorΓ―ΒΏΒ½s 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. ThereΓ―ΒΏΒ½s a hollowness in her chest, and a sensation of dread that she canΓ―ΒΏΒ½t identify or shake. Was it something sheΓ―ΒΏΒ½s 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 thereΓ―ΒΏΒ½s her idle, misdirected younger son, who always needs bailing out of some difficulty. Or perhaps AliceΓ―ΒΏΒ½s trepidation is caused by the loss of her career as an editor at a large publishing house, and the new path sheΓ―ΒΏΒ½s paved for herself as a freelance book doctor. Or it might be the real doctor in her life: her father. Formerly one of New YorkΓ―ΒΏΒ½s top surgeons, he now rests in a nursing home, his mind gripped by dementia. And the Eden that was AliceΓ―ΒΏΒ½s childhoodΓ―ΒΏΒ½the material benefits and reflected glory of being a successful doctorΓ―ΒΏΒ½s daughter, the romance of her parentsΓ―ΒΏΒ½ famously perfect marriageΓ―ΒΏΒ½makes 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 sheΓ―ΒΏΒ½s been trying to solve lies not in the present, as she had assumed, but in the pastΓ―ΒΏΒ½and in the secrets of a marriage that was never as perfect as it appeared.
 Media BuzzFresh Air - NPR - March 8, 2006
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