Woman No. 17

March 6, 2017
A newly-separated writer hires a mysterious young artist as a live-in nanny in this engaging examination of modern art and family dynamics. After unexpectedly asking her husband Karl to move out, Lady enlists the enchanting S to help care for her toddler, Devin, as well as keep an eye on Seth, her mute teenage son from an earlier marriage. As alternating narration quickly reveals, S is a fake name, a front for her real reason for applying for the job. Most of the novel concerns the complicated family situations of Lady and S, primarily Lady’s fraught relationship with Kit, her famous photographer sister-in-law. The book takes its title from a suggestive photo that Kit once took of Lady, a piece of art whose significance informs everything from S’s mother’s alcoholism to Lady’s estrangement from Seth’s biological father. The disclosure of an affair forces each character to reckon with how they’ve deceived both themselves and one another. Lepucki’s (California) brisk style and arresting characterizations make for a compelling portrait of womanhood in the present moment, right down to its intriguing integration of social media.

February 1, 2017
In the Hollywood Hills, a smart, damaged mother of two hires a nanny so she can work on a memoir--but the younger woman is no less a piece of work than she is and intent on an art project of her own.Lepucki's (California, 2014, etc.) third work of fiction is a stylish dramedy in he said, she said style. One narrator is Lady Daniels, who has just sold a memoir based on a magazine article she wrote about her 18-year-old son, Seth, a charismatic child who's never spoken though he has no disability and can communicate with irony and insight using American Sign Language, his iPad, and his Twitter feed. Now she needs someone to take care of Devin, her extroverted toddler, so she can work on her book--and it won't be his father, Karl, since she just kicked him out of the house. He's staying with his famous-artist sister, who took the revealing photo of Lady titled Woman No. 17. The other narrator is Lady's new nanny, a recent college graduate whose real name is Esther Shapiro but who's going by S Fowler. Among the many things S does not reveal in her job interview is the fact that she's just begun a conceptual art project devoted to impersonating her mother as a young woman--even though her mother was and is an impulsive, unbalanced alcoholic. Lady and Esther have much in common (to the point that you sometimes forget which one you're reading). Both had terrible mothers, both lie easily and often, and both are obsessed with Seth. These things draw them together less as friends than as self-involved dervishes on a collision course. Always enjoyable if not always believable, this novel succeeds by staying light on its feet. Or, as one character puts it, "Please don't monetize my bunny."

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January 1, 2017
Lady finds that there's something disturbing about the live-in nanny she's hired so that she can finish writing her book. Following 2014's California, a New York Times best seller and Discover and LibraryReads pick; with a 75,000-copy first printing.

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