Featured Image- Author Bridget Asher, the pen name for Julianna Baggott, W.H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters.
Chick lit writ large, Bridget Asher’s whimsical novel, ALL OF US & EVERYTHING, is a three sister ring circus with an eccentric ringmaster mother and a mysterious spy ring father.
Augusta, august and gusty and gutsy is the matriarch, mother of Esme, Liv and Ru.
Esme, marriage in ruins and Tweet obsessed teenage daughter daughter, Atty, named after Atticus Finch, in tow, Liv, marriage also in tatters, and Ru, never married, but recently engaged and now rethinking the idea, are coming home to Mama.Esme’s husband, a tenured teacher, has run off with a French dentist, thus terminating Esme and Atty’s tenure as inhabitants of the campus, rendering them husband-less, fatherless and homeless.
Also homeless after the collapse of her third marriage, is Liv. For the past twelve years she’d been a marriage profiteer. Her latest ex had wanted children. Liv didn’t. (A marriage profiteer should be smart enough to know that this would only divide profits).
Ru is the author of a best selling novel, based on something remembered from her childhood, which consequently became the basis the basis of a box office smash hit film, but inspiration for a sequel seems to be a slippery slope.
“Ru had no more whimsy, romance or comedy in her tank. She’d decided to turn her sights on non fiction……..maybe she could borrow authenticity. Wasn’t that what non-fiction was? Borrowed authenticity?”
Borrowed authenticity is the basis for the barrage of abuse from her sisters who were not impressed that their lives were press ganged into the pages of a popular novel. The elder siblings make no secret of their distaste for Ru’s borrowed authenticity.
Secret however is the identity of the sperm donor from which these girls sprung, an undisclosed paternity that led to the belief that Augusta had sex with strangers. But this seemingly unorchestrated reunion is about to blow the cover of the identity of the absent dad, more a spook in the shadows rather than a skeleton in a closet.
The man is revealed as one Nick Fleming, an aptly named secret agent, now retired and ready to declassify and reclaim his lost domesticity.
ALL OF US AND EVERYTHING is a fun, breezy read, mixing cloak and dagger with the saga of an eccentric family.
Asher’s writing is illuminated by a million little flares, in characterisation, observation and dialogue. Her punning on rheumatic fever and romantic fever as “weakeners” of the heart works as a motif and refrain.
Like Ru’s book, ALL OF US AND EVERYTHING screams for a screen treatment. Think Robert Redford as Nick maybe re-teaming with Streep, or perhaps with Streisand, for a real way we were.