Name: Pink Slip
ISBN: 9780385323628

Synopsis

A novel about the inescapable bonds of family and personal history, Pink Slip asks the question, in love, what must we reveal about ourselves?

Twenty-five-year-old Lisa Diodetto needed a change. Her job editing holocaust memoirs for a prestigious New York publishing company barely paid the rent, and an ill-thought out affair with a married man had left her flattened by the wheels of romance. At the urging of her first cousin and lifelong best friend Dodie, she left New York for a job upstate in the editorial department of a big pharmaceutical company. It was a clean slate far from her working class upbringing in an Italian-American New Haven neighborhood, and she planned to make the most of it.

Enter Mr. Eben Strauss, Vice-President of Corporate Development. A man of careful composure, a restrained sense of humor, and impeccable manners. A man who certainly wouldn't appreciate Lisa's big mouth and hot temper. A man who would never dream of compromising his position or anyone else's with any kind of workplace impropriety. A man surprisingly attracted by--and attractive to--Lisa.

The relationship that ensues illustrates the very real dangers of falling in love-particularly falling in love with your boss, particularly falling in love with a boss who doesn't know the half of your personal history. Lisa is embarrassed to tell Strauss about her past--her crazy family, her wild escapades with Dodie--but she soon discovers that Strauss is keeping secrets, too. How both of them try to accept the truth about each other makes for a funny, sharp, and moving novel about the difficulties of intimacy and the imperfections of love.

Recommendations

Securing the Commonwealth Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America

by Jennifer J. Baker

Like Pink Slip, this novel is deeply concerned with what remains unspoken between intimate partners—but Offill tells her story in fragmented, lyrical bursts rather than linear narrative. You'll find the same sharp observations about the gap between who we present ourselves to be and who we actually are, but filtered through a marriage and motherhood lens that feels both contemporary and timeless.

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The remains of the day de Kazuo Ishiguro

by Gallix/François

Stevens, like Lisa, is someone who's spent years carefully controlling what he reveals about himself—but where Lisa's struggle is about breaking down those walls, Stevens's tragedy is realizing too late what his restraint has cost him. Ishiguro builds the same kind of emotional tension through what's *not* said, and the unreliable narrator voice will make you reconsider everything by the final pages.

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Olive Kitteridge Fiction

by Elizabeth Strout

Strout captures that same Italian-American New England sensibility that grounds Pink Slip, but she zooms out to show us an entire community of people wrestling with their own secrets and disappointments. The interconnected stories feel like eavesdropping on real lives—messy, funny, and painfully honest in ways that sneak up on you.

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The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

Here's your surprise pick: a gothic mystery that's really about two women learning to trust each other with dangerous truths. Where Pink Slip asks what we must reveal in love, Setterfield asks what we must reveal to be truly *known*—and she wraps it in atmospheric storytelling that feels like discovering an old family secret in a dusty library.

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Plainsong

by Kent Haruf

Published in 1999, Haruf writes about small-town Colorado with the same kind of affectionate, unsentimental eye that Ciresi brings to New Haven—his characters are ordinary people trying to do right by each other despite their limitations and fears. The quiet dignity of his prose and his refusal to judge his characters will feel like a natural companion to Pink Slip's emotional honesty.

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