The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Now a major motion picture, a “convincing and . . . affecting” novel about a woman who retires with her older husband and finds her identity unraveling (The Observer, UK).

What part of our selves do we hide away in order to create a stable, successful adult life?

Pippa Lee has just such a life in place at age fifty, when her older husband, a retired publisher, decides they should move to a retirement community outside New York City. Pippa is suddenly deprived of the stimulation and distraction that had held everything in place. She begins losing track of her own mind; her foundations start to shudder, and gradually we learn the truth of the young life that led her finally to settle down in marriage—years of neglect and rebellion, wild transgressions and powerful defiance.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is the study of a brave, curious, multilayered woman—an acutely intelligent portrait of the many lives behind a single name.

“Wise and irreverent.” —Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

“Like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections without the bitterness, mixed with Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides minus the eccentricity, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing read.” —The Sunday Telegraph (UK)

“Miller brings a simmering intelligence and verbal flair to this deft exploration of the courage required to own your own life.” —Booklist