The New York Times Book Review - Elisabeth Egan
Looking for a book that fires up the synapses? Check out Heidi Pitlor's Impersonation…Pitlor's voice is witty and brisk, bringing warmth and light to questions of identity, independence and, yes, intellectual property. Who owns your stories? How much are they worth? Allie Lang's answers are complicated. Watching her reach them is like sitting down with a refreshingly honest friend who skips the part about how great her life is and dives right into the real stuff. We need more friends like this. Authors, too.
Publishers Weekly
06/29/2020
Pitlor’s smart and thought-provoking latest (after The Daylight Marriage) explores the complexities of feminism, privilege, and the telling of one’s life story. Allie Lang lives in a shabby Berkshires house with her four-year-old son, Cass, eking out a precarious living as a ghostwriter. After a lucrative contract ends when her client is charged with sexual assault, she’s delighted to be asked to ghostwrite a parenting memoir for wealthy attorney Lana Breban, whose high-profile feminist advocacy Allie admires and who, like Allie, is also raising a son. Ironically, Lana is too busy—and too reliant on full-time childcare—to provide the kind of intimate recollections her team has in mind for Lana’s book, which is intended to soften her prickly public image as she considers a Senate run. Allie’s already shaky support system collapses as her boyfriend, Kurt, decides to hitchhike around New England and her mother moves to Florida, leaving her desperate for time to work. With the deadline for Lana’s book looming, Allie begins fleshing out Lana’s story with her own recollections of raising Cass. While elements of the plot stretch plausibility, such as Lana’s team signing off on Allie’s embellishments, the sharply observed depictions of how lives are shaped by financial status ring all-too true. Fans of Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion will want to take a look. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Looking for a book that fires up the synapses? Check out Heidi Pitlor’s Impersonation . . . Pitlor’s voice is witty and brisk, bringing warmth and light to questions of identity, independence and, yes, intellectual property. Who owns your stories? How much are they worth? Allie Lang’s answers are complicated. Watching her reach them is like sitting down with a refreshingly honest friend who skips the part about how great her life is and dives right into the real stuff. We need more friends like this. Authors, too.” —The New York Times Book Review “Both the story and its resourceful heroine are fresh, intelligent, and charming." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “In a novel that’s smart, surprising, thought provoking . . . Pitlor offers an astute study of what it means to be a woman today." —Library Journal “[A] searing and nuanced exploration of identity." —Booklist “Pitlor’s smart and thought-provoking latest explores the complexities of feminism, privilege, and the telling of one’s life story . . . The sharply observed depictions of how lives are shaped by financial status ring all too true. Fans of Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion will want to take a look.” —Publishers Weekly “By turns revealing, hilarious, dishy, and razor-sharp, Impersonation lives in that rarest of sweet spots: the propulsive page-turner for people with high literary standards.” —Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers “Smart, funny, and provocative, Impersonation tunnels through our current politically-charged American landscape with humor and empathy. It's a story of parenting—and surviving—in a time when the messy realities of everyday life often clash with ideology. As page-turningly readable as it is relatable. I’ll be recommending to my book group.” —Jessica Shattuck, author of The Women in the Castle “Heidi Pitlor has written a wonderfully rare thing: a comedy of manners set in the 21st century that brilliantly grapples with some of the more thorny issues of class, privilege, and parenting of our day. Smart, funny, and generous in spirit, Impersonation is an engaging meditation on who controls the narrative and why it matters. A terrific read that will have you hooked from page one.” —Kate Walbert, author of A Short History of Women “Impersonation is the book we need now: an unflinching look at our current moment, and at questions few of us dare to ask. If our personas do good in the world, does it matter what we did to create them? How much hypocrisy are liberals willing to tolerate? Can women raise good men? Provocative, heartfelt, and often hilarious, this is a novel I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come.” —Anna Solomon, author of The Book of V "With refreshing humor and an endearing charm all her own, Heidi Pitlor channels the narrative slyness of Rachel Cusk and the political acumen of Rebecca Solnit to deliver this zeitgeisty novel about the struggles of anonymity, accountability, modern-day mothering, and making ends meet in the gig economy. As both loss and possibility swirl around our lost but scrappy heroine, you can’t help but root for her to claim her own voice and personhood. A smart behind-the-scenes tour of the murky world of publishing, politics, and the good people who get caught in the cross-fire.” —Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men “For our heroine Allison, this is her story of survival and endurance in these maddening times. She goes to extraordinary measures for her son and her work, yet the path is not always clear, and far from easy. A gifted storyteller, Pitlor is also not afraid to ask the tough questions. What does it mean to raise good boys? Good people? What does it mean to be a woman, a feminist, a believer in others and, above all, in yourself?” —Weike Wang, author of Chemistry
Library Journal
06/12/2020
Having left behind the corporate world, ghostwriter Allie Lang is thrilled with her independence yet struggling to support herself and her son in a crummy upstate New York rental house with a tentative love interest living in the basement and sometimes contributing to the rent. She's used to shapeshifting for each new client, but her latest subject proves to be a challenge. In-the-news lawyer and women's rights advocate Lana Breban is aiming for public office, and her handlers want a memoir that will make her look cozier. But though Lana has a son, she doesn't have a lot of mom stories to tell—she barely throws statistics Allie's way—and Allie soon learns that she's expected to substitute her own stories. Initially, Lana feels almost like a villain, taking advantage of Allie and pushing the idea of women's rights but not necessarily living it, yet the narrative soon shifts to challenge the idea that Lana could ever be a cookie-baking mom and hard-charging public servant at the same time. VERDICT In a novel that's smart, surprising, thought provoking, and bound to set a few readers on edge, making for good book-club debate, Pitlor (The Daylight Marriage) offers an astute study of what it means to be a woman today.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-05-18
Ghostwriting for celebrity clients yields more drama than income for a desperate single mom.
“Let me guess: you live in Brooklyn….You went to Vassar or maybe Oberlin….You got your MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop….You shop at Whole Foods.” The feminist political powerhouse Lana Breban and her people think they know all about Allie Lang, who’s traveled by bus from her shabby rented house in Western Massachusetts to discuss the latest snag in their memoir project—but they have her all wrong. About the only things Allie shares with the bougie hipster they imagine her to be are liberal politics and feminism. Allie is a single mother by choice and is raising her son, Cass, almost completely alone except for occasional help from her wandering hippie boyfriend and a nearly senile neighbor. Her last ghostwriting job, the memoir of a high-profile bro from the video game world, was to be so well paid she had planned a trip to Disney World with Cass—but then the book got cancelled due to an avalanche of sexual harassment allegations against its subject. Her cupboard is bare and the rent is overdue when she’s hired to write a book for Lana, a fierce advocate for women’s rights who’s on her way to elected office. The problem is, the book is supposed to be a warm and fuzzy memoir of motherhood, and Lana has been far too busy with her career to do much hands-on parenting at all. She has a staff for that. The heartwarming stories her agent, publisher, and political team are looking for simply don’t exist. What’s Allie supposed to do, substitute her own experiences? Pitlor’s third novel is set during the lead-up to and the aftermath of the 2016 election; she dryly and sometimes poignantly channels the zeitgeist through nuanced characters, settings, and just-right details.
Both the story and its resourceful heroine are fresh, intelligent, and charming.
