Announcing the McNally Editions Book Club
Inaugural McNally Editions Book Club on Ex-Wife, by Ursula Parrott
March 18th, 6:30pm
McNally Jackson Downtown Brooklyn
RSVP Required - see below
Held monthly at McNally Jackson Downtown Brooklyn and hosted by Ama Kwarteng, the McNally Editions Book Club is organized around books that have been largely forgotten, the reissued classics and rare finds that have slipped from the mainstream and are waiting to be discovered by a new set of readers. This month we’ll discuss Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife, first published anonymously in 1929, a story of a divorce and its aftermath that scandalized the Jazz Age.
"Like Fitzgerald but from a woman’s perspective . . . Ex-Wife is a sharply observed, intimate account of a failed marriage, several failed love affairs, an abortion, numerous alcoholic interludes and one-night stands . .. as if Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Oscar Wilde had collaborated to examine the war between the sexes in the post-Victorian era."
— Joyce Carol Oates
"As it went on I found myself more and more moved by the writer's ability to render on the page the complexity of lost love coupled with the loss of first youth, and then second youth. Quite remarkable."
— Vivian Gornick
It's 1924, and Peter and Patricia have what looks to be a very modern marriage. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work, Patricia as a head copywriter at a major department store. When it comes to sex with other people, both believe in “the honesty policy.” Until they don‘t. Or, at least, until Peter doesn‘t—and a shell-shocked, lovesick Patricia finds herself starting out all over again, but this time around as a different kind of single woman: the ex-wife.
An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife captures the speakeasies, night clubs, and parties that defined Jazz Age New York—alongside the morning-after aspirin and calisthenics, the lunch-hour visits to the gym, the girl-talk, and the freedoms and anguish of solitude. It also casts a cool eye on the bedrooms and the doctor’s offices where, despite rising hemlines, the men still call the shots. The result is a unique view of what its author Ursula Parrott called “the era of the one-night stand”: an era very much like our own.
Reserve your place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the book club meeting on any product in store.