I Smile Back by Amy Koppelman

From the Publisher

“Koppelman mostly writes from inside Laney's disillusioned mind, ricocheting between the quotidian details of wife and motherhood and big-picture musings, forming exquisite stand-alone tone poems." —Elle

"[Koppelman's] brave and challenging look beyond appearances of beauty to the ugly reality of a disturbed mind will remain with readers long after they've finished the book." —Library Journal

"Amy Koppelman's I Smile Back is amazing. There's wit, speed, range, and complete authority here. Among other qualities, it has presence—you hold in your hands a pretty wild ride—and a novel as fascinating as this one seems destined to make its way to Hollywood. Read the book, instead: it's bound to be sharper, more moving, and flat-out better than any adaptation will be." —Darin Strauss

"Amy Koppelman probes deeply into the dark and cavernous recesses of a picture-perfect suburban mom, and emerges with one of the most terrifying novels I've read in ages. It's a glorious little explosion of a book." —Dani Shapiro

"Laney Brooks is a heroine on par with Joan Didion's Maria Wyeth. She captivates not only because she recognizes the darkness closing in around her, but because a part of her welcomes it." —David Benioff

In the follow-up to her acclaimed debut, A Mouthful of Air, which drew comparisons from critics to The Bell Jar and The Awakening, Amy Koppelman delivers an unrestrained statement on the modern suburban woman.

Laney Brooks acts out. Married with kids, she takes the drugs she wants, sleeps with the men she wants, and disappears when she wants. Lurking beneath Laney’scomposed surface is the impulse to follow in the footsteps of her father, to leave and topple her family’s balance in the process.

Publishers Weekly

This crushing novel by the author of A Mouthful of Air is a shocking portrait of suburban ennui gone horribly awry. Laney Brooks, approaching middle age in Short Hills, N.J., appears to have it all: doting husband, two beautiful children, the big house with a kidney-shaped pool. But beneath the facade of upper-middle-class perfection, Laney's life descends into a chasm of indiscriminate sex and drug and alcohol abuse. Koppelman's prose style is understated and crackling; each sentence is laden with a foreboding sense of menace, whether she's describing a sunny Florida resort or the back alley of a seedy strip mall. Laney's self-debasement can be a bit over-the-top at times, but like a crime scene or a flaming car wreck, it becomes impossible not to stare. (Dec.)

Andrea Kempf - Library Journal

A beautiful, thirty-something suburban housewife, Laney Brooks is married with two lovely children to a successful insurance broker and author. However, her perfect life is a facade: she drinks too much, pops pills, snorts cocaine, and sleeps with any man who catches her eye. Koppelman's portrait of this self-destructive suburban matron is wrenchingly accurate. In elegant, almost poetic prose, she guides readers through the mind-numbing activities that make up Laney's days and dissects those events that have precipitated her deep, chronic clinical depression. This short novel is not an easy read; so vividly is Laney's misery limned that as the heroine spirals downward, readers intimately share her agonies. The author, whose first novel, A Mouthful of Air, detailed a young New Yorker's postpartum depression, is becoming the spot-on chronicler of 21st-century women with mental illness. Her brave and challenging look beyond appearances of beauty to the ugly reality of a disturbed mind will remain with readers long after they've finished the book. Highly recommended for literary collections.

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