Lillian on Life, by Alison Jean Lester
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Lillian on Life, by Alison Jean Lester
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'I absolutely loved it. A delight ...so fresh and clever and subversive' Kate Atkinson 'I completely loved Lillian on Life. What a great voice, what energy and wit ...very original and often extremely funny' Karen Joy Fowler Lillian, a single, well-travelled woman of a certain age, wakes up next to her married lover and looks back at her life. It's not at all the life she expected. Walking the unpaved road between traditional and modern options for women, Lillian has grappled with parental disappointment, society's expectations and the vagaries of love and sex. As a narrator she's bold and witty, and her reflections - from 'On Getting to Sex' to 'On the Importance of Big Pockets' or 'On Leaving in Order to Stay' - reverberate originally and unpredictably. In Lillian on Life, Alison Jean Lester has created a brutally honest portrait of a woman living through the post-war decades of change in Munich, Paris, London and New York. Her story resonates with the glamour and energy of those cities. Charming, sometimes heartbreaking, never a stereotype, Lillian is completely herself; her view of the world is unique. You won't soon forget her.
Lillian on Life, by Alison Jean Lester- Brand: Lester, Alison Jean
- Published on: 2015-06-01
- Format: Large Print
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.10" h x 5.70" w x 8.80" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Library Binding
- 500 pages
Review I absolutely loved it. A delight ... so fresh and clever and subversive Kate Atkinson, author of Life After Life A beautifully written, deft debut; edgy, elegant Lillian will stay with you Adele Parks I completely loved Lillian on Life. What a great voice, what energy and wit ... very original and often extremely funny Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves A delicious, sweet-sad debut novel Sainsbury's Magazine A dazzling first novel ... In short vignettes, Lillian looks back, drawing an impressionistic portrait of a bold life full of ad-ven-ture - erotic and otherwise - in prose spiked with unflinching observations, riotous riffs and poignant reflections Washington Post From the moment I caught sight of the book cover I was hooked ... I read Lillian on Life in one sitting, very swiftly as though she were telling me her stories and giving me advice. I might have raced through it, but I know I'll read it again The Mitford Society A bold and witty narrator ... impossible to put down Image It's rare that you find a book that's so easy to read yet so difficult to forget, but this debut novel will stay with you and have you questioning your own love life for weeks after finishing it ... Think Sex and the City meets Rona Jaffe's 1958 novel The Best of Everything Stylist [Lillian on Life is] written in a strangely companionable style, like you were sharing a night of secrets and girl chat with an old friend. It felt at once both familiar and surprising and kept me reading on to find out all the fascinating things that Lillian had done in her life. Lester has created a likeable heroine and an enjoyable story lisatalksabout.com I will be recommending Lillian to many other women of my acquaintance. Her passion, achievements and self-effacing observations have the potential to entertain and inspire us all Never Imitate The snapshots build into a witty, candid account of those little dilemmas that the average woman meets every day - except that Lillian is far from average. In fact, I wish we could have lunch Saga Try not to fall in love with Lillian, Alison Jean Lester's vivacious, funny and charming heroine in this excellent debut novel ... A gorgeous read, at moments heartbreaking, often joyful and mostly unforgettable Red What emerges is a voice so quirky and candid, a story so rich in telling detail, that it is easy to forget this is a novel, not a memoir. I wish Lillian were real and could do lunch - she'd be a hoot Lady I'll never forget Lillian on Life. Looking backward, she's brutally honest about her needs, her lovers, her parents. Salinger could have invented her ... Roth would have loved her ... and so will you. A rare book, a little raunchy, but very rich and very real Ilene Beckerman, author of Love, Loss and What I Wore Lillian on Life is a quirky book with a very deep heart and soul. I found it full of life and full of wisdom Erica Jong In this remarkably mature first novel, Alison Jean Lester has channeled the worldly yet wistful elegance of Colette to portray an unforgettable heroine. Lillian's provocative reflections on love, vanity, sexual intimacy, and surviving as an independent woman over half a century are deeply moving Julia Glass, author of Three Junes and The Widower's Tale What a splendid book! By turns acerbic and warm, urbane and homespun, Lillian on Life is - like its protagonist - charming, funny, and unabashedly smart. But as slender and enjoyable as this book is, it's much more than simply a lark. Each elegantly compressed chapter leaves us luxuriating in thought: about the snippets of experience so vividly depicted, and about those that have been, with perfect art, left out Leah Hager Cohen
About the Author Alison Jean Lester was born in the United States and has variously grown up, studied, worked, written and raised her two children in the US, the UK, China, Italy, Taiwan, Japan and Singapore. She currently lives with her family in Singapore. Lillian on Life is her first novel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Whenever I wake up next to a man, before
I’m fully awake, I think it’s Ted. Of course
it never is.
That’s okay. This morning I watched Pandora walk
the length of Michael’s naked body. His skin turned to
gooseflesh as she started up his thigh. Her pretty gray paw
depressed the flesh of his belly, and his sleeping penis rolled
toward his hipbone. She stepped off him at the shoulder.
She could have walked on the bed; there was a little space
between him and me. Maybe he doesn’t exist for her. Maybe
she was saying that he’s no better than a mattress. She snuggled
into my neck, purring smugly like an idling Jaguar.
I wanted Michael to wake up and see us like that: an
independent woman beloved of her elegant cat. But of
course he didn’t. They don’t. They wake up at all the wrong
times, and see all the wrong things.
To be fair, we drank a lot of red wine last night, and I
can hold it better than most people. My eyes still snap open
in the morning. Wine is still my friend. I hate that I can’t
drink coffee in the wee hours and then sleep anymore,
though. The body evolves, then it devolves. It’s terrible. One
day you’re someone you know, and the next you’re someone
you don’t. You dry up. It’s embarrassing.
Every once in a while I wonder if I’m glad Ted didn’t
stick around for my menopause. A woman has so many
things to hide after fifty. I ask myself if we could have tolerated
so much physical change, followed by dotage.
I don’t have to wonder with Michael. He comes and
goes. There isn’t time for him to notice everything.
The trick at my age is to keep some K-Y Jelly in an attractive
pot on the bedside table. You squeeze it out of the
tube into the pot for when you have a visitor. When his
hands are beginning to move on you, you turn away and
slip your fingers into the jelly. He can caress your bottom
or your shoulders in the meantime. When you turn back
you take him in your hand and lubricate him. Maybe he’s
not even erect yet, and this way you have the satisfaction
of knowing that what you’re doing for him is working.
I’m not sure there’s a bigger satisfaction than that in life.
And as long as he’s feeling it’s for him, you’ve diverted his
attention—and even your own—from the fact that the lubrication
is for you. On top of it all you maintain your sense
that you’ve still got plenty of sap in your tree. Name me a
wife who does that.
Michael’s wife is crazy. She probably didn’t seem it when
she was young. She probably just seemed young. Now she
just seems silly. That hair band of hers. The tangential
things she says. She’s almost as tall as I am, and only about
five years younger, fifty-two I think, but she blinks at you.
She stands up tall and her chestnut hair sits perfectly turned
up on her shoulders in the same way I’m sure it has since
1960, and she smiles and blinks, as if to protect herself from
anything modern or unpleasant. Imagine life by her side.
How would you ever connect? Well, you wouldn’t.
Do some people not need excitement? I’ve always
thought humans were too complicated not to need stimulation.
What does Michael do to keep his wife hanging on?
Or what does she do that keeps him married to her? I don’t
like to ask. I’ve learned not to cling.
He sleeps really late when he’s with me. I don’t think it’s
allowed at home, certainly not naked. He’s intimated as
much. Separate beds too.
I thought my parents’ marriage had come to an end the
day their twin beds arrived. I didn’t know it was happening
all over the neighborhood, probably all over the country,
and Mother was merely keeping up with the Joneses. But
how often did the Joneses go up to my parents’ bedroom?
Never. Mother just felt them walking around in her head,
and had to keep up.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful. A lovely, wise, and powerful character study By B. Case "Lillian On Life," by Alison Jean Lester, is a lovely, wise, and powerful character study that reads like a memoir of (mostly) stand-alone linked stories. It starts out with the main character, Lillian, a woman in her late fifties or early sixties who has never married. She's lying in bed with her married lover who is still asleep. As she lies next to him, wide-awake, she reminisces about why her life--especially her love life--has not turned out like she'd planned.The story is told in rough chronological order from Lillian's teens forward, eventually returning--as of course it had to--full circle back to the beginning. It's a novel that focuses on Lillian's relationships--with her mother, her father, her black Southern nanny, her sister-in-law, her best girlfriend, and all her major and minor lovers (many married men) along the way to the present day. What we learn is who Lillian was, how she navigated the important relationships in her life, and how she developed into the woman she has become.Throughout the book, the questions for me were always: what does it take to become a woman who is content to be the lover of a married man; and what does it take to become the type of woman who can build her happiness on someone else's pain and loss?Unfortunately, my goal in reading the novel didn't turn out to be the author's goal in writing it. The author was content to just let the character reveal herself and not to force her to delve too deeply into her psychological or moral underpinnings. As it turns out, Lillian is apparently not the type of character who ever delves too deeply into what makes her act the way she does. She just lives her life as she want to live it...perhaps as she must live it.I was fascinated in the character, beguiled by her story, and shocked by her seeming lack of a moral compass.Lillian just was Lillian. And aren't we all just who we are? Her life took a random course--as most of our lives end up doing--and she arrives in the present a bit confused as to how she got there.The book was well-written, meditative, starkly honest, and aimed at a literary audience. At times it was humorous, at other times quite sad, and often filled with the scenes of sweet remembered passion.I liked it quiet a lot, but I did not love it.As we grow older, we all learn that we should try to not be judgmental about other human beings. We should just accept them as they are...that there is much about life that makes it biologically impossible for many humans to change their behavior in any significant way. Julia Glass, one of my favorite authors, said of this book that it was "a remarkably mature first novel." I wholly agree with her. Lester's philosophy about people like Lillian is ultimately exceptionally mature. It is the type of "wisdom" we hope we all achieve as we age and mellow in understanding for our fellow travelers through life...to just accept them faults and all, as they are, without judgment.If what I've said about this book interests you, I sincerely recommend that you read Lillian's story and see if you can accept her and her life without judgment. Whether you can or cannot, I'm confident you'll find the journey artistic and worthwhile.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful. Lillian's Life & Yours: A Good Fit? By Sharon Isch Following are some quotes from fictional Lillian's take on life, which I think should give you a good idea whether this is your kind of book. (For the most part, it wasn't mine.)"If I think about Alec too long, I feel regret like a cloud of lead....The first time he picked me up for dinner he looked me over and nodded once in approval, to himself it seemed, checking off some sort of box in his head. It irritated me but I tingled."...."If I've learned anything from life with other men, it is to keep my distance from male pride. It's an electric fence."...."A big man chewing his lip is an attractive, vulnerable thing. A small man chewing his lip is a rodent."....To a friend whose relationship just fell apart: "You have to build up a pile of rocks, I told her. These hard times are when you build the pile of rocks in your soul.""When I die, if I can't have six former lovers as my pall bearers, I want six strapping gay men instead. Some will be stoically clenching their teeth and making their jaw muscles dance; some will be singing lustily with tears streaming down their cheeks.""You must tell your own story. Never let someone, even someone as familiar to you as your sister-in-law, think she knows you better than you know yourself. She only sees what you do; she doesn't see who you are inside.""One of the most useful things I've learned in my life is that I can have an out-of-body experience when I need to."
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. Tender, Sexy, Fun, Funny, Lovely By Barbarino This is another one of those books, the ones that are hard to review because you can't quite put your finger on what it was about them that moved you or spoke to you, you just know it did.This book touches on the various phases of a woman's life; being young and inexperienced, then older and wiser. It touches on relationships, love, heartbreak, devotion and compromise. It's a fond look back at a woman's adventurous youth from the vantage point of maturity and also a reflection on how her life has come to be what it is now.I folded over many corners in this book, marking the pages with particularly interesting or moving passages. Here's one: 'When you're in a relationship you mold yourself to it. You curve your body around it and you curve your mind around it in order to maintain it. Sometimes you don't realize you're crippled until it's too late.' And another: 'I've always wondered why people look so much to action for meaning. When people tell you a story - something that happened to them, something important - don't ask them what they did. Ask them what they wanted to do. What they want to do is who they are. Actions are whispers compared to dreams.'I really enjoyed this book, it was easy to read, the words flowed like water, I never wished the story had been pared down, I never wondered what the author meant. I read this in two sittings and enjoyed every page. I think this would generate some good discussion for a book club. I'd be curious about what my friends would think of Lillian because of her relationships with married men. I think some people would find Lillian less sympathetic than I did.Thank you to the Amazon Vine Program which made this book available to me, this is another book that I don't think I would have noticed if it hadn't been offered through the program.
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