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Where'd You Go, Bernadette meets Beautiful Ruins in this reverse love story set in Paris and London about a failed monogamist's attempts to answer the question: Is it really possible to fall back in love?
Despite the success of his first solo show in Paris and the support of his brilliant French wife and young daughter, thirty-four-year-old British artist Richard Haddon is too busy mourning the loss of his American mistress to a famous cutlery designer to appreciate his fortune.
But after Richard discovers that a painting he originally made for his wife, Anne - when they were first married and deeply in love - has sold, it shocks him back to reality and he resolves to reinvest wholeheartedly in his family life... just in time for his wife to learn the extent of his affair. Rudderless and remorseful, Richard embarks on a series of misguided attempts to win Anne back while focusing his creative energy on a provocative art piece to prove that he's still the man she once loved.
Skillfully balancing biting wit with a deep emotional undercurrent, debut novelist Courtney Maum has created the perfect portrait of an imperfect family - and a heartfelt exploration of marriage, love, and fidelity.
"An unapologetically thoughtful novel told without melodrama and with a lot of heart." - Booklist
"A solid, well-written character-driven contemporary novel." - Library Journal
"The not-terribly-sharp humor is more enjoyable than the predictable plot shot through with sentimentality." - Kirkus
"A gem of a novel about the tangles of love, regret, and hope that might or might not hold a marriage together. Courtney Maum's deft, beguiling debut charms with its wit and glows with compassion." - Maggie Shipstead, author of Seating Arrangements
"Courtney Maum writes with such honesty and verve about how we struggle to deserve the people we love. Intensely personal and engagingly complex, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You is a moving, complicated, big-hearted novel." - Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang
"Antic, sexy, satirically deft, and of course funny, this novel is also, on both the personal and political levels, smart about the bottomlessness of our capacities for self-sabotage, and moving about the fierceness of our yearning to make good." - Jim Shepard, author of You Think That's Bad and Like You'd Understand, Anyway
"Maum's witty and insightful novel captures a lifetime of falling in and out of love. It's an investigation of marriage which often combines its utter clear-sightedness and its tremendous warmth in the very same sentence. So agile and fully realized." - Ned Beauman, author of The Teleportation Accident
This information about I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Courtney Maum is the author of five previous books, including the romantic comedy Touch (New York Times Editors' Choice) about a tech worker's efforts to reclaim her humanity and the memoir The Year of the Horses chosen by the Today show as one of the best reads for mental health awareness. The author also of the groundbreaking publishing guidebook Before and After the Book Deal and the bestselling Substack newsletter by the same name, Maum is an educator and writing coach helping people hold on to the joy of art making in a culture obsessed with turning artists into brands. In addition to her creative writing, teaching, and advocacy work for writers at the Authors Guild, Maum worked internationally as a brand strategist and corporate namer in the advertising world for twenty years. Learn ...
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