Impersonation

June 1, 2020
Ghostwriting for celebrity clients yields more drama than income for a desperate single mom. "Let me guess: you live in Brooklyn....You went to Vassar or maybe Oberlin....You got your MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop....You shop at Whole Foods." The feminist political powerhouse Lana Breban and her people think they know all about Allie Lang, who's traveled by bus from her shabby rented house in Western Massachusetts to discuss the latest snag in their memoir project--but they have her all wrong. About the only things Allie shares with the bougie hipster they imagine her to be are liberal politics and feminism. Allie is a single mother by choice and is raising her son, Cass, almost completely alone except for occasional help from her wandering hippie boyfriend and a nearly senile neighbor. Her last ghostwriting job, the memoir of a high-profile bro from the video game world, was to be so well paid she had planned a trip to Disney World with Cass--but then the book got cancelled due to an avalanche of sexual harassment allegations against its subject. Her cupboard is bare and the rent is overdue when she's hired to write a book for Lana, a fierce advocate for women's rights who's on her way to elected office. The problem is, the book is supposed to be a warm and fuzzy memoir of motherhood, and Lana has been far too busy with her career to do much hands-on parenting at all. She has a staff for that. The heartwarming stories her agent, publisher, and political team are looking for simply don't exist. What's Allie supposed to do, substitute her own experiences? Pitlor's third novel is set during the lead-up to and the aftermath of the 2016 election; she dryly and sometimes poignantly channels the zeitgeist through nuanced characters, settings, and just-right details. Both the story and its resourceful heroine are fresh, intelligent, and charming.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 12, 2020

Having left behind the corporate world, ghostwriter Allie Lang is thrilled with her independence yet struggling to support herself and her son in a crummy upstate New York rental house with a tentative love interest living in the basement and sometimes contributing to the rent. She's used to shapeshifting for each new client, but her latest subject proves to be a challenge. In-the-news lawyer and women's rights advocate Lana Breban is aiming for public office, and her handlers want a memoir that will make her look cozier. But though Lana has a son, she doesn't have a lot of mom stories to tell--she barely throws statistics Allie's way--and Allie soon learns that she's expected to substitute her own stories. Initially, Lana feels almost like a villain, taking advantage of Allie and pushing the idea of women's rights but not necessarily living it, yet the narrative soon shifts to challenge the idea that Lana could ever be a cookie-baking mom and hard-charging public servant at the same time. VERDICT In a novel that's smart, surprising, thought provoking, and bound to set a few readers on edge, making for good book-club debate, Pitlor (The Daylight Marriage) offers an astute study of what it means to be a woman today.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 29, 2020
Pitlor’s smart and thought-provoking latest (after The Daylight Marriage) explores the complexities of feminism, privilege, and the telling of one’s life story. Allie Lang lives in a shabby Berkshires house with her four-year-old son, Cass, eking out a precarious living as a ghostwriter. After a lucrative contract ends when her client is charged with sexual assault, she’s delighted to be asked to ghostwrite a parenting memoir for wealthy attorney Lana Breban, whose high-profile feminist advocacy Allie admires and who, like Allie, is also raising a son. Ironically, Lana is too busy—and too reliant on full-time childcare—to provide the kind of intimate recollections her team has in mind for Lana’s book, which is intended to soften her prickly public image as she considers a Senate run. Allie’s already shaky support system collapses as her boyfriend, Kurt, decides to hitchhike around New England and her mother moves to Florida, leaving her desperate for time to work. With the deadline for Lana’s book looming, Allie begins fleshing out Lana’s story with her own recollections of raising Cass. While elements of the plot stretch plausibility, such as Lana’s team signing off on Allie’s embellishments, the sharply observed depictions of how lives are shaped by financial status ring all-too true. Fans of Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion will want to take a look.

June 1, 2020
Ghostwriting a book by feminist Lana Breban seemed like a dream assignment for Allie Lang, particularly as the book, timed to coincide with a U.S Senate run by the blue-haired women's-rights advocate, is intended to be all about Lana's experiences raising her boy. Allie has a young son herself, whom she shuttles between preschool and the dubious oversight of her frail neighbor, while Allie tries to stay financially afloat between writing jobs and working as a freelance landscaper. But after an unfortunate ex-lax incident while her neighbor was supervising her boy, Allie's shakily constructed world begins to tumble down around her. With her boyfriend prone to wandering off for extended periods, Allie must juggle her commitments while trying to describe Lana's life as a mother with barely any information to go on. In this searing and nuanced exploration of identity, Allie slowly includes more of her own stories in Lana's book, grappling with how much of herself she must give away and setting the stage for a powder keg of revelations should the truth come out.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)