Late Night Talking
by Leslie Schnur
Summary
From the acclaimed author of The Dog Walker comes a tender and funny novel about bad behavior, the fragility of friendship and family, and how we cannot choose whom we love.
Jeannie Sterling, host of a late-night NYC talk show, vents with her listeners about everyday injustices—[and] the many aggravations of modern urban life….
For as long as she can remember, success in her career has been more than enough. But after all these years of being single, Jeannie realizes that some of the pieces of her perfect puzzle aren’t fitting quite right….
Delightfully real and deliciously flawed, Jeannie Sterling is a character we can’t help but root for as she faces her life’s most hilarious—and heartbreaking—challenges.
Excerpt
Morning Walk
There is something about Tribeca at five A.M. that is preternaturally romantic, Jeannie thought as she made a left onto Warren from Broadway, the ca-thunk of her Frye boots on the broken sidewalk echoing in the ethereal quiet, her fringed suede jacket protecting her against the cool morning air. An ellipse of lavender light sat like a halo over the city, the heavens above it cobalt blue. The streets were almost empty, hushed, except for a lone taxi and a van double-parked up the block. In less than an hour the morning rush would descend, but until then, this city of millions was at peace, dreamy and mysterious. And it was all hers. The cobblestone streets, the narrow alleys, the tree-lined squares, and the red brick buildings made her imagine ardent young lovers in their beds, made her aware of her own heart, full of possibility and desire.
She took this walk, rain or shine, five days a week, through the streets she loved. Only blocks from Ground Zero, this part of town was complex: historically rich, seedy, and chic, with ninety-nine-cent stores, designer furnishings, and trendy restaurants sharing a sidewalk. Its tragic, horrific past united the community, making it feel like a village, separate and apart from the rest of the city.
By the time Jeannie reached the corner of Hudson and Franklin, the preworkday hubbub was under way. She waved to Bill, who was unlocking the hefty padlock on the security gate at Ideal Dry Cleaners; to Tranh, who was sweeping the doorway at Jin Market; to her buddy Jonas at the counter of Socrates Coffee Shop. She bid a “Good morning!” to Esther, the tranny who religiously walked her two miniature white poodles, Marilyn and Marlene, up and down North Moore every morning at the same hour. She gave a buck to Stuart, the homeless guy who lived in the alley off Beach. These were the things she did every morning, the things that made this huge city feel like a quaint small town to her.
After her show, the long walk felt necessary, restorative. Tonight was a case in point. All those callers, all those complaints about all those idiots who behaved as if they never had a mother to teach them anything. And she certainly knew, as well as anybody, the effect of having a mother and then not having a mother. You have someone monitoring your deeds and then you don’t, and you’re on your own.
But something was going on in this beloved town of hers. Even with the crime rate down, rudeness was at an all-time high. Tonight she’d heard just a few examples: the woman getting a manicure who asked a young woman to lower the volume on her iPod—and then she was unjustly asked to leave the salon; the man who wouldn’t give a pregnant lady his seat on the bus because it was her choice to get pregnant, and not his responsibility; the woman at the gym on the elliptical who’d cover her timer with a towel and repeatedly set it to zero, hoping nobody noticed that she’d far exceeded her thirty-minute limit; the guy talking on his cell phone while at the urinal in the office bathroom.
Copyright © 2007 by Leslie Schnur. Reprinted by permission of Washington Square Press, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
Reviews
“[A] cute, lighthearted novel about expectations, love, and the cost of doing the right thing”—Booklist
“Jeannie’s dilemmas as an imperfect everywoman will resonate with a wide range of readers”—Publishers Weekly
"Entertaining...The main character is lovably flawed…her up-and-down universe may remind us of a lot of people we know, including ourselves"—LifetimeTV.com
Author's Biography
Leslie Schnur was previously the editor-in-chief of Delacorte Press/Dell Publishing. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, she currently lives in New York City with her husband, two children, and two dogs.