Sparkling . . . [with] a bouncy roman à clef charm.” — Publishers Weekly
“A juicy roman à clef sympathetically imagines two young women on opposite sides of an extramarital affair. . . . Beautifully written, both sharp and bighearted, funny and true.” — Kirkus , starred review
“Clever, surprising plots developments abound, and exquisitely drawn characters have their perceptions radically changed when they are forced to confront temptations, conflicts and unexpected challenges. Thurm's literary authority is on full display in this deeply engrossing and dramatically juicy novel." — Shelf Awareness
“This is the book I needed and adored. With writing so beautiful; but wait—don’t mistake ‘beautiful’ for ‘at the expense of storytelling’—because A Blackmailer’s Guide to Love gave me characters so real, so sympathetic, so human, that their good and bad deeds made for compulsive, rewarding, delicious reading. When you can’t wait to tell your novel-loving friends about the treat they have in store, that is the test of true book love.” — Elinor Lipman, author of Rachel to the Rescue and Good Riddance
“If Dorothy Parker had tried writing Fatal Attraction , she might have come up with something like this wonderfully wry roman à clef about New York’s overheated literary world in the 70s. Although Marian Thurm is a far more compassionate observer of human nature, and her appealingly troubled characters, by turns funny, touching and unsettling, are completely her own.” “Through her wide-eyed young heroine, Thurm wonderfully conveys the fantasies, disillusions, and vanities of literary New York in the late 1970s. Her biting sketches of the era's key figures bring that lost world alive in granular detail.” Andrea Barrett, author of The Air We Breathe and Archangel “Thurm spins a story about love and ambition, and the cost of both, focusing on a desperate-to-be-known writer, her philandering boss, her confused, straying husband, and the wily paramour who’s out to blackmail him. Smart, savvy, heartbreakingly funny, and oh so wise, with prose like sparklers on every page. Writers are going to absolutely adore this book, but hey, so will everyone else on the planet.” Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Picture of You and With or Without You — Suzanne Berne, author of The Dogs of Littlefield
“Through her wide-eyed young heroine, Thurm wonderfully conveys the fantasies, disillusions, and vanities of literary New York in the late 1970s. Her biting sketches of the era's key figures bring that lost world alive in granular detail.” — Andrea Barrett, author of The Air We Breathe and Archangel
“Thurm spins a story about love and ambition, and the cost of both, focusing on a desperate-to-be-known writer, her philandering boss, her confused, straying husband, and the wily paramour who’s out to blackmail him. Smart, savvy, heartbreakingly funny, and oh so wise, with prose like sparklers on every page. Writers are going to absolutely adore this book, but hey, so will everyone else on the planet.” — Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Picture of You and With or Without You
Through her wide-eyed young heroine, Thurm wonderfully conveys the fantasies, disillusions, and vanities of literary New York in the late 1970s. Her biting sketches of the era's key figures bring that lost world alive in granular detail.
If Dorothy Parker had tried writing Fatal Attraction , she might have come up with something like this wonderfully wry roman à clef about New York’s overheated literary world in the 70s. Although Marian Thurm is a far more compassionate observer of human nature, and her appealingly troubled characters, by turns funny, touching and unsettling, are completely her own.” “Through her wide-eyed young heroine, Thurm wonderfully conveys the fantasies, disillusions, and vanities of literary New York in the late 1970s. Her biting sketches of the era's key figures bring that lost world alive in granular detail.” Andrea Barrett, author of The Air We Breathe and Archangel “Thurm spins a story about love and ambition, and the cost of both, focusing on a desperate-to-be-known writer, her philandering boss, her confused, straying husband, and the wily paramour who’s out to blackmail him. Smart, savvy, heartbreakingly funny, and oh so wise, with prose like sparklers on every page. Writers are going to absolutely adore this book, but hey, so will everyone else on the planet.” Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Picture of You and With or Without You
Thurm spins a story about love and ambition, and the cost of both, focusing on a desperate-to-be-known writer, her philandering boss, her confused, straying husband, and the wily paramour who’s out to blackmail him. Smart, savvy, heartbreakingly funny, and oh so wise, with prose like sparklers on every page. Writers are going to absolutely adore this book, but hey, so will everyone else on the planet.
This is the book I needed and adored. With writing so beautiful; but wait—don’t mistake ‘beautiful’ for ‘at the expense of storytelling’—because A Blackmailer’s Guide to Love gave me characters so real, so sympathetic, so human, that their good and bad deeds made for compulsive, rewarding, delicious reading. When you can’t wait to tell your novel-loving friends about the treat they have in store, that is the test of true book love.
Clever, surprising plots developments abound, and exquisitely drawn characters have their perceptions radically changed when they are forced to confront temptations, conflicts and unexpected challenges. Thurm's literary authority is on full display in this deeply engrossing and dramatically juicy novel."
03/15/2021
The sparkling latest from Thurm (Today Is Not Your Day ) looks back on the heyday of glossy magazine publishing. In 1978, 25-year-old Mel Fleischer is working at an unnamed magazine as an assistant to cranky literary editor Austin Bloch. When Mel isn’t making copies or rejecting submissions from the slush pile, she’s writing and submitting her own short stories, one of which, to her surprise, is accepted by the New Yorker . Mel is married to supportive if not entirely reliable therapist Charlie, and the story of one of his clients, Julia Myerson, a PhD student with a failed marriage and dried-up teaching position, is chronicled in a parallel narrative. When the relationship between Charlie and Julia starts to slip out of professional bounds, it threatens to affect the bond between Mel and Charlie. Those familiar with Thurm’s writing career will notice significant parallels, which gives the novel a bouncy roman à clef charm. While the characters’ emotions often run high, such as when Mel meets the New Yorker ’s editor (“The words love at first sight , sort of, are what come to her; but really it’s more a profound awe and reverence”), for the most part Thurm mellows them out with a detached distance. This will please those looking to feed their nostalgia for a bygone era. Agent: Robin Rue, Writers House. (May)
Marian Thurm is either a movingly compassionate observer of human foibles or a charmingly ruthless one. The best stories in her fourth collection suggest that she is both… [with] her keen gift for portraying the slippery, comical psychology of people who have a tough time believing this is how their lives have gotten kicked out from under them. She makes it all look effortless, and that’s no easy task.
New York Times Book Review
With its concise and insightful prose and pitch-perfect dialogue, this is a collection to savor.
Praise for These Things Happen : “What distinguishes these stories… is Ms. Thurm's ability to extrapolate whole lives from a few lines of dialogue, a handful of carefully selected observations. In many respects, the world she depicts is an absurdly contemporary one… and yet Ms. Thurm writes with such precision, such attention to psychological detail that she makes this world completely recognizable and true. More importantly, she is always careful to situate her characters within a dense matrix of relationships… we come to see her characters in the round, like beautifully shaped sculptures, rather than as simple portraits in a frame.
Careful, assured, exact, she is a delight to read. She has a fine ear for the way people talk, a clear head and a heart that is almost broken—‘almost’ because there’s humor and wit and a glimmer of hope.
An exceptional collection of stories… vivid and startling… Thurm embraces the ironies and the absurdities of the ordinary world and transforms them into a series of small epiphanies.
Careful, assured, exact, she is a delight to read. She has a fine ear for the way people talk, a clear head and a heart that is almost broken—‘almost’ because there’s humor and wit and a glimmer of hope.
★ 2021-05-19
"It is 1978 and Mel is twenty-five years old"—and like her creator did at that time, she works at a magazine which seems to be Esquire for a jerk who seems to be Gordon Lish, who recklessly edits the stories of a man who seems to be Raymond Carver. Also like Thurm, Mel is about to have her own first story published in the New Yorker at the age of 25, and she will go on to write "stories mostly in the present tense, mostly about the infinite ways, large and small, in which her characters manage to disappoint one another"—a perfect description of the selection of Thurm's stories written between 1979 and 2021 and just published as Pleasure Palace . And after she endures the events that begin on April 14, 1980, when she finds an angry note from another woman in her husband's backpack, Mel knows that "she will, the instant she’s good and ready, write the only [novel] she’s certain she is capable of writing...she’s already confident of the title: The Blackmailer’s Guide to Love ." It turned out to be Thurm's ninth novel, actually, and in addition to evoking the experience of the betrayed young writer, it also fully imagines that of her nemesis. The plight of Julia Myerson unfolds in chapters that alternate with Mel's. Abused as a child, divorced from an awful man, unable to make progress on her dissertation, Julia is cobbling together a living as a dog walker and a caregiver to an elderly couple. After her longtime therapist commits suicide by jumping off a bridge, she becomes the patient of Charlie Fleischer, a caring psychologist with a sweet face, a warm smile—and a wedding ring. "She’s not stupid: she’s fully aware that falling for your therapist is a 'thing,' that it’s something that happens all the time, every day of the week. But that doesn’t render what she feels for Charlie any less meaningful, any less potent, does it?"
Beautifully written, both sharp and bighearted, funny and true.
