"Just
when it seemed that Jennifer Belle had masterfully captured the single-girl
experience in her widely praised first novel, Going Down, here
comes High Maintenance, the tale of a very different but no less
engaging young woman flying solo in the Big Apple...Razor-sharp, deadpan
observations and dazzling prose—by turns utterly hilarious and heart-wrenching.
— San Francisco Chronicle
"Irresistible."
—Newsday
"A
hilarious take on the search for real estate as a metaphor for finding a
life."
—T he Boston Globe
"An
outrageous, hilarious account of one woman's journey to find herself, the
'Loft of her Life,' and a man worthy of sharing apartment space with in
New York City...High Maintenance is in turn a wicked and twisted
coming-of-age-in-the-city story, an uproariously funny tale of the little
girl lost and a scathing parody of the narcissism of New York living.
—The Tampa Tribune
"Addictive
and captivating...The same wisecracking, fierce yet vulnerable point of
view that made Going Down so special is taken even further in High
Maintenance.
— Time Out New York
"Just
buy the damn book."
—The New York Observer
Liv Kellerman has left her cheating husband— and more tragically, their fabulous duplex with Empire State Building views. Now she's contemplating her next move. With few marketable skills, a lot of appeal, and more than a little attitude, she can go farther than she ever thought possible.
Excerpt:
The morning before I was planning to leave my husband, my friend Violet convinced me to go with her to see a swami in someone's townhouse. I was surprised to see that he was an American guy in an orange dress sitting under a real Picasso.
"When we meditate we keep our eyes open," the swami said. I was relieved I didn't want to sit in a strange room with a bunch of freaks with my eyes closed. "Even when we look deeply inside ourselves, we never stop looking out at the world," he said.
I sat there for forty-five minutes with my eyes open thinking about my situation and looking around the room. It was a beautiful living room, all very upholstered, with stairs behind me that led to a private garden. The woman who owned it, our hostess, had been proudly running around, fluffing pillows and pouring the swami tea.
