Start Without Me: A Novel

by Joshua Max Feldman

Overview

The author of the critically acclaimed The Book of Jonah explores questions of love and choice, disappointment and hope in the lives of two strangers who meet by chance in this mesmerizing tale that unfolds over one Thanksgiving Day.

Adam is a former musician and recovering alcoholic who is home for Thanksgiving for the first time in many years. Surrounded by his parents and siblings, nieces and nephews—all who have seen him at his worst—he can’t shake the feeling that no matter how hard he tries, he’ll always be the one who can’t get it right.

Marissa is a flight attendant whose marriage is strained by simmering tensions over race, class, and ambition. Heading to her in-laws for their picture-perfect holiday family dinner, her anxiety is intensified by the knowledge she is pregnant from an impulsive one-night-stand.

In an airport restaurant on Thanksgiving morning, Adam and Marissa meet. Over the course of this day fraught with emotion and expectation, these two strangers will form an unlikely bond as they reckon with their family ties, their pasts, and the choices that will determine their way forward.

Joshua Max Feldman focuses his knowing eye on one of the last bastions of classical American idealism, the Thanksgiving family gathering, as he explores our struggles to know—and to be—our best selves. Hilarious and heartrending, Start Without Me is a thoughtful and entertaining page-turner that will leave its indelible mark on your heart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062668745
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/17/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	284
File size:	899 KB

About the Author

Joshua Max Feldman is the author of The Book of Jonah. Born and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts, he has lived in England, Russia, and Switzerland, and currently resides in Brooklyn.

Editorial Reviews

08/28/2017
Feldman’s second novel, after The Book of Jonah, chronicles a Thanksgiving Day in the lives of recovering alcoholic Adam and flight attendant Marissa. After an embarrassing mishap involving a bungled attempt to make coffee for his family, Adam walks out on his parents and siblings and makes the acquaintance of Marissa at an airport restaurant. Adam has been sober for nine months and is trying to start over as a bank employee, following a life as a successful musician. He misses his former partner Johanna, whose mental problems exacerbated their downfall as a couple and a band. Marissa misses the easy early days with her husband, Robbie, and is now pregnant after a tryst with her high school sweetheart. She sees an opportunity to be distracted when she decides to drive motormouth Adam back to his family, and she feels pity when Adam is distraught after a fight with his sister, leading Marissa to invite him to dinner with her overbearing mother-in-law, Roz, and frosty father-in-law, Leo, who are both wealthy and accomplished. Marissa bristles at the idea of Robbie’s parents still supporting them as Robbie pecks away at his screenplay and dismisses her yearning for independence. Feldman nicely demonstrates how well-meaning Adam gets in his own way and how Marissa’s hang-ups with class and money lead her to make matters unnecessarily complicated, but falters at constructing Johanna, who exists as the flimsiest outline of a character. An unexpected third act has Marissa trying to make peace with her past while Adam fights off his need for a drink. The novel wraps up a little too neatly, but it is a satisfying story about chance meetings and kinship. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Equal parts funny and searingly beautiful...well worth the ride.” — New York Daily News

“Feldman’s engaging novel offers sublime levity to balance the gravity of his characters’ various struggles, and Adam’s and Marissa’s tales interweave effortlessly as they search for meaning among many doubts and what-ifs.” — Booklist

“A satisfying story about chance meetings and kinship.” — Publishers Weekly

“Joshua Max Feldman has written the quintessential Thanksgiving novel. START WITHOUT ME has all the ingredients for an explosive holiday and a page-turning read: the turkey dinner hastily eaten, secrets and lies, and extra servings of love and dread with the possibility of redemption.” — Marcy Dermansky, author of The Red Car

“START WITHOUT ME is an exceptional novel.  Following the Thanksgiving of two strangers who help each other through the catastrophic fall-out of their decisions, it’s a tender, funny, beautifully written evocation of the maelstrom of the holidays and the potential to connect.”
— Zachary Mason, author of Void Star and The Lost Books of the Odyssey

“Pitch-perfect.” — #1 New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline

“When it comes to hitting rock bottom, Joshua Max Feldman is a deft recording angel. Both in his first novel, The Book of Jonah, and now again in Start Without Me, Feldman shines a loving and unsparing light on ordinary persons at the worst moments of their lives.” — BookPage

From the Publisher

Joshua Max Feldman has written the quintessential Thanksgiving novel. START WITHOUT ME has all the ingredients for an explosive holiday and a page-turning read: the turkey dinner hastily eaten, secrets and lies, and extra servings of love and dread with the possibility of redemption.

Marcy Dermansky

Pitch-perfect.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline

Equal parts funny and searingly beautiful...well worth the ride.

New York Daily News

START WITHOUT ME is an exceptional novel.  Following the Thanksgiving of two strangers who help each other through the catastrophic fall-out of their decisions, it’s a tender, funny, beautifully written evocation of the maelstrom of the holidays and the potential to connect.”

Zachary Mason

When it comes to hitting rock bottom, Joshua Max Feldman is a deft recording angel. Both in his first novel, The Book of Jonah, and now again in Start Without Me, Feldman shines a loving and unsparing light on ordinary persons at the worst moments of their lives.

BookPage

Feldman’s engaging novel offers sublime levity to balance the gravity of his characters’ various struggles, and Adam’s and Marissa’s tales interweave effortlessly as they search for meaning among many doubts and what-ifs.

Booklist

Feldman’s engaging novel offers sublime levity to balance the gravity of his characters’ various struggles, and Adam’s and Marissa’s tales interweave effortlessly as they search for meaning among many doubts and what-ifs.

Booklist

Equal parts funny and searingly beautiful...well worth the ride.

New York Daily News

09/15/2017
In Feldman's absorbing second novel (after The Book of Jonah), two strangers meet in the bar/restaurant of an airport hotel in Connecticut. Adam Warsaw, an alcoholic ex-musician, returns to his parents' home for Thanksgiving. Up before anyone else, he accidentally shatters a full coffee pot. Unable to face his family without a drink he flees. At a nearby airport hotel, Marissa Russell, a tired flight attendant, married six years but pregnant from a one-night stand, is at odds with her husband, Robbie, who is waiting for her at the home of his upper-class family in Vermont. Robbie, son of a black father and a Jewish mother; Adam, adrift, missing his former bandmate Johanna; and especially Marissa, with her terrible secret, all have toxic families. When fate couples Adam and Marissa, they set out on a one-day odyssey that will force them to confront family history and their rocky present. This compact, well-crafted novel, alternating between two points of view, asks the age-old question—how do you get from where you are to where you want to be?—but does so with indelible protagonists and a vision firmly anchored in the reality that surrounds them. VERDICT Highly recommended for those interested in family dynamics, which means most of us.—Ron Terpening, formerly of Univ. of Arizona, Tucson

Library Journal

2017-08-08
It's Thanksgiving, and two 30-something strangers—"a couple of strays"—join forces to help each other survive the family dramas that lie ahead. Adam Warshaw, nine months and four days sober, wants to spend the holiday with his parents and siblings after many years of absence but still doesn't seem quite capable of going through with it. Flight attendant Marissa Russell, struggling with work and a secret pregnancy, needs to join her in-laws for the Thanksgiving meal while simultaneously trying to mend her fraying marriage. When Adam's and Marissa's paths cross in an anonymous Connecticut hotel restaurant (he's decided to flee back to San Francisco; she's heading to her family), the familiar scenario underpinning Feldman's (The Book of Jonah, 2014) readable second novel is set in motion: Adam changes his mind again and the pair set off on a drive to Vermont, hitting problems en route and alternately propping each other up until resolution can be found. If the conventions of this time-honored holiday dramedy formula are simmering tensions, bad behavior, black-sheep tendencies, and bedrock truths revealed, so it goes with these two: Adam's family struggles to welcome him back into the fold, while Marissa's in-laws, an improbable mixed-race group marked by political aspirations and short tempers, offer the antithesis of a warm embrace. Incorporating psychology and a musical back story, Feldman's novel aims high but loses its momentum, spending too much time looking backward and indulging the central characters' internal monologues. The road-trip narrative line becomes ragged, and sketchy secondary characters offer little engagement. The overriding questions in Thanksgiving entertainments are usually: can mistakes be corrected, new leaves turned, and survival ensured? The answers here will not come as any great surprise. A new recipe for turkey? Not quite.

Kirkus Reviews