Description

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When her professional and family life collide, a playwright starts journaling every morning to push through her writer’s block in this laugh-out-loud and fresh take on family, friendship, and the chaos of midlife.

“[A] winning adult debut…” –Publishers Weekly

Elise Hellman was once heralded by audiences and critics as a “playwright to watch.” Then they forgot all about her. When a prestigious theater company unexpectedly offers her a generous commission to write a new play, she has an opportunity to turn her career around. With sixty-five days left until her deadline, Elise starts scribbling a few pages of stream-of-consciousness first thing every morning as a way to get over her writer’s block—a technique called Morning Pages, popularized in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

What emerges is a witty confessional in which Elise chronicles her life with her teenage stoner son and her overbearing and eccentric mother, who is losing her memory but not her profanity. She writes about her lingering feelings for her ex-husband, her best friend who is acting oddly, and the confusing encounters she has with a handsome stranger in an elevator.

As she writes, the marked-up scenes from her play, Deja New, are revealed, as a story within the story.

Morning Pages is about what life throws at you when you’re trying to write. It is both a humorous exploration of the creative process and a relatable coming-of-age tale for the generation sandwiched between caring for their parents and caring for their kids.

About the Author

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Kate Feiffer, a former television news producer, is an illustrator, and author of eleven highly acclaimed books for children, including Henry the Dog with No Tail and My Mom Is Trying to Ruin My Life. Morning Pages is her first novel for adults. Kate currently divides her time between Martha’s Vineyard, where she raised her daughter Maddy, and New York City, where she grew up.

Praise For…

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“[A] winning adult debut…. Feiffer endears readers to her overextended protagonist by capturing Elise’s frustration at being unable to communicate with her family members and the relief of her eventual creative breakthrough. Those in the mood for a lighthearted story that deals with some darker family themes will appreciate this.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Feiffer’s novel is a seductive meditation on the shifting roles women play as daughters, mothers, wives, and artists. Full of wise observations and a scathing wit, this smart, engrossing read will stay with you long after you’ve finished. Original and enthralling.”
— Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Spectacular

“Morning Pages plies a withering wit in the service of an open-hearted exploration of love, career, and family. As the playwright-narrator tackles her block through the writers-class exercise of early morning free association, we feel the squeeze of her sandwich-generation predicament, caring for a declining mother and an inscrutable and increasingly distant adolescent son. Not since Andrew Sean Greer’s Less have I laughed so much and, at the same time, been so moved.”
— Geraldine Brooks

“I laughed out loud at Kate Feiffer’s comic characters and clever way with words. Her protagonist Elise is caught in the all-too-common middle-aged pickle of being sandwiched between a disengaged teenage son and an overly engaged parent, while at the same time, trying to revive her flatlining career and moribund love life. Feiffer’s inventive framework of a play within a novel deftly reveals the challenging issues beneath the humor. The reader roots for Elise to find a path forward and show us the way.”
— Alisyn Camerota, CNN

“A compulsively readable tale of a woman writer in a full-fledged ‘sandwich-generation’ crisis. Her interior monologue is a hilarious, poignant blend of existentialism and stand-up comedy. Feiffer’s playfully eviscerating-yet-compassionate observational humor is so incisive, I could barely refrain from calling friends to read snippets of it aloud. And her prose is simply addictive: each new paragraph brings some delicious wordplay; I want a Phrase-a-Day calendar stolen from Elise’s morning pages.”
— Nicole Galland, Author of Stepdog

“Kate Feiffer has done with words what she is best known for with her illustrations, making us laugh out loud but also feeling the profound power of heartwarming love.”
— Nancy Slonim Aronie, Founder, Chilmark Writing Workshop