Back When We Were Grownups Book

The woman is Rebecca Davitch, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother. Is she an impostor in her own life? she asks herself. Is it indeed her own life? Or is it someone else's?

On the surface, Beck, as she is known to the Davitch clan, is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is, after all, her vocation something she slipped into even before finishing college, when Joe Davitch spotted her at an engagement party in his family's crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house, where giving parties was the family business. What caught his fancy was that she seemed to be having such a wonderful time. Soon this large-spirited older man, a divorcé with three little girls, swept her into his orbit, and before she knew it she was embracing his extended family plus a child of their own, and hosting endless parties in the ornate, high-ceilinged rooms of The Open Arms.

Now, some thirty years later, after presiding over a disastrous family picnic, Rebecca is caught un-awares by the question of who she really is. How she answers it how she tries to recover her girlhood self, that dignified grownup she had once been is the story told in this beguiling, funny, and deeply moving novel.

Playboy - Anthony Venutolo

If there's one thing writer Joe Eszterhas knows how to do, it's how to push the envelope.

Best known for authoring such guilty pleasures as Basic Instinct, Showgirls and Flashdance, the Hungarian-born scribe might have some explaining to do after the public gets hold of American Rhapsody, a walloping 432-page uppercut that connects square on the jaws of Washington and Tinseltown.

If you like dish served on a big, flat, silver platter, look no further, because Eszterhas (after a significant hiatus from screenwriting) has returned to his journalistic roots. Only this time, instead of digging up compelling facts, he aims for the jugular in the guise of "news."