Ask Again Later

by Jill A. Davis Narrated by Ilyana Kadushin

Overview

Emily has a tendency to live with one foot out the door. For her, the best thing about a family crisis is the excuse to cut and run. When her mother dramatically announces they've found a lump, Emily gladly takes a rain check on life to be by her mother's side, leaving behind her career, her boyfriend, and those pesky, unanswerable questions about who she is and what she's doing with her life.

But Emily realizes that she hasn't run fast or far enough. One evening, Emily opens the door, quite literally, to find her past staring her in the face. How do you forge a relationship with the father who left when you were five years old? As Emily attempts to find balance on the emotional seesaw of her life, she takes a no-risk job as a receptionist at her father's law firm and slowly gets to know the man she once pretended was dead.

From the brainy, breezy writer who ""writes like a professional comic"" (The Onion) and is ""hard to stop reading once you start"" (USA Today) comes a laugh-out-loud tale that confirms you can recover from your parents, the bad habit of missed opportunities, and men who romance you with meat. When opportunity knocks, it's time to stop running and start living.

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

From the author of Girls' Poker Night (2001), another light comedy with a dash of neurosis. Emily Rhode's mother has just called to say that she's dying. Granted, Joanie Rhode is prone to self-serving dramatics, but she does actually have breast cancer. Emily drops everything in a seeming act of filial altruism. In a single day, she gives up her job as a lawyer at a large firm, walks out on doting boyfriend Sam and moves back into her childhood bedroom. Emily isn't quite sure how her mother's cancer created such an upheaval in her own life, but her shrink thinks it may have something to do with that little problem she has with commitment. The one bright spot is the reappearance of her father. Though the whole family has stayed in Manhattan-including sister Marjorie, a pregnant socialite with an army of paid assistants-Emily has rarely seen Jim Rhode since she was five, when her parents divorced. On a whim, she accepts a job at his law firm, not as a lawyer but as the receptionist. Father and daughter share a cab to work every morning, and Emily begins to glimpse in him what everyone else in the office sees: a happy-go-lucky fellow, a pleasant conversationalist, a rock-solid sort of man. Which makes his long-ago abandonment seem all the more puzzling. But confronting the issue would just seem . . . rude. As she spends her days idly staring through her Plexiglas enclosure, Emily begins a flirtation with a young lawyer, all the while pining for Sam. This is hardly the stuff of great drama, yet Davis makes the narrative work with effortless light humor and genuine thoughtfulness, creating a sympathetic narrator who is left with one big question: Now what?Well-drawn characters with emotionalintegrity surmount the familiar plotting.

Play Magazine (Philadelphia)

[A] frank, funny journey…a brisk novel about reconnecting with parents…

Bookreporter.com

Davis tackles real-life issues and infuses these rather somber moments with requisite levity and humor.

Romantic Times

...an intriguing read.

Booklist

[ASK AGAIN LATER] is both very funny and deeply moving.

BlogCritics Magazine

This is one of the best books I have read so far this year.

Elle.com

...the humor is deftly interwoven with genuinely affecting moments that lend unexpected depth.

Time Out New York

... smart-gal spin on the chick-lit formula… the writing and the characters lend the book an emotional heft.

Dave Letterman

Jill Davis is extremely personable, courteous, and punctual.

Emily Griffin

ASK AGAIN LATER is an engaging slice of life.

Jancee Dunn

...you’ll... veer between uncontrollable laughing fits and being stunned and misty-eyed by its poignant turns.

Richard Russo

ASK AGAIN LATER...rewards at every level.

Lucinda Rosenfeld

A snappy and sardonic take on learning to love your (dysfunctional) family.

Connecticut Post

Comedy and drama is perfectly balanced in Jill A. Davis’ new novel, Ask Again Later…

Sacramento Bee

There are laughs, there are tears. Nice job.

Entertainment Weekly

Hilarious, heartfelt...Davis’s witty voice is pitch-perfect. A-

The Today Show

Great book! Hysterical!

Los Angeles Times

[The] dialogue...crackles with electricity between highly charged characters and is often as funny for what’s left unsaid…

(Philadelphia) - Play Magazine

"[A] frank, funny journey…a brisk novel about reconnecting with parents…"

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170324989
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/20/2007
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Ask Again Later

A Novel

Chapter One

I can remember the first Christmas after my father left. I was five. We didn't get a tree that year. We didn't buy gifts. Somehow it seemed pathetic to deck the halls and all—when Dad wasn't there. We missed opportunities. And I got really good at missing opportunities.

I am Emily. Emily Rhode. When I was in second grade, I experimented with changing my identity by misspelling my last name. I had hopes that a new spelling might transform me and permit me access to a new home, and a new life.

Sometimes it was Road. Or Rowed, and even Rode. Almost no one ever noticed the way my name was spelled. People just assume you're going to get your own name right. Except for Miss Bryan, my English teacher. She seemed curious. Or, at the very least, not comatose. She gave us an assignment.

"Write one paragraph about your home," said Miss Bryan. "Spelling counts."

Write about home . . . should I tell her the combination to the safe, too? I was eager to share, the perfect accomplice, and I didn't need more than one sentence. The sentence is as true today as it was twenty years ago: Home is a place you can never leave behind. I liked that it was both insistent and ambiguous. I spelled my name correctly, because spelling counts.

Whileyou can't leave it behind, you can look at the events of your past from a new point of view. Turn them around. See all the angles. Consider it your second chance. Second chances do come your way. Like trains, they arrive and depart regularly. Recognizing the ones that matter is the trick.

My office chair is parked behind a small desk, and on the desk is a giant phone. I intentionally use the word parked because the chair is enormous and—if you believe the old wives' tales—engineered by the Ford Motor Company.

In front of my desk is an impressive wall of bulletproof Plexiglas. It's the one thing I'll miss about this crappy job when I leave. I've been able to work in confidence knowing that if someone tries to shoot me—the fabulously sultry gal who answers the telephone—the bullets will bounce mockingly off of the Plexiglas and not disturb me from the important business of answering the telephone.

When the phone doesn't ring for a while, I start to think about bringing in my own gun and taking a couple of shots at the Plexiglas to test it. Sure the manufacturer says it's bulletproof. I don't own a piece though, and when I call a shooting range somewhere in Millbrook, New York, they tell me not to call again. Ever. They refused to answer my question. How much will it cost to hire a guy to take a couple of shots at a piece of Plexiglas in a Midtown high-rise? It isn't their line of work, they claim.

"Yeah, but bottom line it for me, sister. Send a body out to gimme an estimate. Bottom line it for me," I say.

"You're crazy, lady," they say, and hang up. I'm just killing time and hoping they'll play along, and I'm disappointed when they refuse. For a moment I worry that I work for one of those companies that monitors its phone calls under the guise of quality control. I am instantly comforted when I realize I work for a law firm too disorganized to tap its own phones.

To say all I do is answer phones is to seriously downplay my role around here. I also control the buzzer button that opens the main door, allowing lawyers into their offices after they get off of the elevator, or return from the bathroom.

Sometimes I fail to push the buzzer with the deftness they might like. I eat up a second of this person's life, five seconds of that person's life. The ones who grow impatient quickly and who are easily angered are the ones I steal twenty seconds from for the sheer pleasure of it. They grunt and growl in sincere pissiness, and it makes me feel terrific, alive in that way that you don't feel often enough.

I daydream—and get paid for it. I recall a scene from An Officer and a Gentleman. At the end of the movie Richard Gere, dressed in his naval whites, goes into a factory, picks up Debra Winger, and carries her out of that depressing place with all of those dirty machines.

I wish that would happen to me. Of course the whole time I'd be worried that the guy was trying to guess my weight or something. I realize how truly pathetic I am. Some guy in a uniform drags his woman out of the workplace to stick her in a house to cook and possibly even clip coupons, and I am starting to buy into it, into the antifemale propaganda disguised as romance. As soon as he picks her up, things have to head south from there, because at some point, he has to put her down.

I blame my father for my current situation. It's so much easier to blame him than rehash my past and actually work through it. Instead, I pin all of my disappointment and loss on my current post. I can't decide what's worse, clock-watching or minimum wage. Luckily, I'm steeped in both, so I don't have to choose.

The world of nepotism is ugly and dark. I know. There are people out there paying their dues who probably deserve to sit behind this Plexiglas more than I do. If not for the fact that my father is so well connected, I'd be forced to do a job I got solely on merit. I'd be working as a lawyer, on track to make partner, at a firm where a senior partner was not 50 percent responsible for creating me. I would be boosting my résumé and sleeping with young enthusiasts of all things legal. The notion of being shot would, in all likelihood, not even occur to me. It certainly wouldn't preoccupy me. I may be the only professional in history to take several giant steps backward by cashing in on my "connections."

Continues...

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Excerpted from Ask Again Later by Jill Davis Copyright © 2007 by Jill Davis. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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