I Know a Woman: 08/31/08

"I Know a Woman" is really nothing more than a series of inter-related conversations. It's sort of like the Lake Wobegon monologues that come near the end of an episode of A Prairie Home Companion.

Here the narrator is a thirty-something ex-wife of a born again Christian who left her husband after he discovered one of his employees was moonlighting as a striper. She starts her monologue with the tale of Judy the striper and moves on to her relationship to her and she tries to use Judy's story as an explanation for why she chose to leave her husband.

Her story though never gives an adequate explanation of why she left or what she's doing with her life now that she's single. Her monologue gets sidetracked with her crashing of a millionaires only investment club and the resulting conversation with a one handed man named Neil.

Although the separate pieces of the monologue are interesting, there's no satisfying cohesion to them. The story just ends after yet another tangent. With tighter editing it could have been better.

The stories in the book are: (Click on a title to read reviews).

• "A Day in the Life of My Great Brit Book Tour" by Adriana Trigiani.
• "Five" by Julianna Baggott
• "Leaving a Light On" by Claire LaZebnik
• "Moving Day" Cindy Chupack
• "Yoga Babe" Lauren Henderson
• "The Truth About Nigel" by Jennifer Weiner
• "Voodoo Dolls, C-Cups and Eminem" by Melissa Senate
• "The Bamboo Confessions" by Lauren Weisberger
• "Amore" by Laura Wolf
• "Andromeda on the Street of Ducklings" by Judi Hendricks
• "Bad Manners" by Chris Manby
• "The Two-Month Itch" by Sarah Mlynowski
• "I Know a Woman" by Quinn Dalton
• "Just Visiting" by Nancy Sparling
• "Forty Days" by Jill Smolinski
• "The Uncertainty Principle" by Lynda Curnyn
• "Small Worlds" by Gretchen Laskas

Comments