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Drinking Closer to Home: A Novel Paperback – January 18, 2011
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“An honest, haunting portrayal of a beguiling, yet maddening family, who together come of age amidst the shifting morals of a country on the cusp of tremendous cultural change. With humor, compassion and a keen insight into the human psyche, Drinking Closer to Home proves that despite the best of intentions, where we come from and where we end up, are even closer than we could ever imagine.” —Robin Antalek, author of The Summer We Fell Apart
“So raw and funny I wanted to read parts aloud to strangers.” —Dylan Landis, author of Normal People Don't Live Like This
From Jessica Anya Blau, critically-acclaimed author of The Summer of Naked Swim Parties and Mary Jane, a coming-of-age novel about growing up and learning to love your insane family. Drinking Closer to Home is a poignant and funny exploration of one family’s over-the-top eccentricities—a book Ron Tanner calls “heartfelt and hilarious.”
- Print length337 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJanuary 18, 2011
- Dimensions8.09 x 5.31 x 0.92 inches
- ISBN-100061984027
- ISBN-13978-0061984020
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“At the end of the day, the Stein family is dysfunctional, foul-mouthed, appalling, loving and ridiculously endearing, thanks to Blau’s hilarious rendition of their group dynamic. Soundtrack? Hotel California. Woody Allen directs.” — Baltimore Sun
“The domestic relationships . . . are brilliantly rendered, a contemporary California version of Philip Roth.” — Austin Chronicle
“An entertaining romp through one family’s history.” — Boston Globe
“A light-hearted, enthralling read that enables us to laugh at our own less-than-perfect families.” — Bust Magazine
“Blau writes funny, often heartbreaking, and always relatable anecdotes ... [Her] lifelike characters are such a joy to get to know that one feels sorry to leave them behind.” — Publishers Weekly
“From painful humor to poignant scene-setting, [Blau] takes no prisoners in her candid look at an unconventional clan.” — Booklist
“Jessica Blau’s second novel is not only a wise and pitch-perfect depiction of family dynamics but also happens to be unrelentingly, side-splittingly funny. I dare you to forget this family.” — Irina Reyn, author of What Happened to Anna K.
“If you think you’ve read enough novels about mixed up families already, go ahead and read one more. Jessica Anya Blau’s DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME is a phantasmagoric, hilarious carnival ride.” — Madison Smartt Bell
“Jessica Blau’s DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME is heartfelt and hilarious as it explores every nook and cranny of this wonderful (and wild) family. If you want to know why we love our parents and siblings even as they drive us to drink and distraction, you must read this book.” — Ron Tanner, author of Kiss Me, Stranger
“The sharpness of Jessica Blau’s voice and wit never ceases to amaze me. From the first page this surprising novel takes a classic tale--adult children going home again--and turns it on its head. An absorbing, heart-wrenching read.” — Katie Crouch, author of Men and Dogs
“A very funny -- but also deeply humane -- novel . . . Parental love and booze and drugs and all the complications of becoming an adult: This is a smart book -- a book that makes you cringe and laugh out loud.” — Pauls Toutonghi, author of Red Weather
“If you took Jonathan Franzen, soaked him in Southern California culture, sprinkled him with biting insight and twisted humor, you would get a book that tasted something like DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME.” — Katie Arnoldi, author of Point Dume
“Jessica Anya Blau has created an unforgettably unique family . . . and done them a great service by placing them in a compelling story that is alternately funny and sad as hell. I don’t think I’d last twelve days in this family, but I could read about them forever.” — Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
“DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME is as raw and heartbreaking as it is tender. Jessica Anya Blau has written an honest, haunting portrayal of a beguiling yet maddening family, who together come of age amidst the shifting morals of a country on the cusp of tremendous cultural change.” — Robin Antalek, author of The Summer We Fell Apart
“[A] tour de force of a second novel . . . deliciously funny, endearingly naughty, resolutely hopeful, and highly enjoyable. Blau is a masterful storyteller.” — Greg Olear, author of Totally Killer and the forthcoming Fathermucker
“[Blau has] lavished such attention on these people that I found it impossible not to care about them--and equally impossible to forget them.” — Steve Yarbrough, author of Safe from the Neighbors
“Hilariously irreverent . . . . This unconventional joy ride of a novel is also an unexpectedly powerful and multi-layered exploration of unbreakable family bonds.” — Gina Frangello, author of Slut Lullabies
“Jessica Anya Blau’s emotional turf is kinship, from its betrayals to its bonds―and in DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME she covers this territory with an honesty so raw and funny I wanted to read parts aloud to strangers.” — Dylan Landis, author of Normal People Don't Live Like This
“Chekhov knew that laughter and tears are only a breath apart. So does Jessica Anya Blau. The family in her marvelous DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME . . . make[s] beautiful, hilarious music through time and all the spaces in the heart.” — James Magruder, author of Sugarless
“DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME is a gloriously rich portrait of three adult children who discover that the tensions and hurts they still have between them are inextricably tied to their laughter and their love.” — Susan Henderson, author of Up From the Blue
“[H]ilarious and heartbreaking....[A] testament to the impossibility of ever truly ‘leaving home,’ and the great triumph of this book is in Blau’s skillful illumination of how that’s both a blessing and a curse....This novel will stay with you for a very long time.” — Skip Horack, author of The Southern Cross and The Eden Hunter
“As perfectly pitched as it is comically painful, DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME echoes a profound Tolstoyan truth about family. Many novelists have a sense for place, the gifted ones deliver life with such fidelity that the truth hits very close to home indeed.” — Marisol, author of The Lady, The Chef, and The Courtesan
“I have never encountered such exciting, eccentric, and lovably flawed characters as those Jessica Anya Blau creates in DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME.” — Allison Amend, author of Stations West
From the Back Cover
They say you can never really go home again. Adult siblings Anna, Portia, and Emery are about to discover just how true that is.
About the Author
Jessica Anya Blau was born in Boston and raised in Southern California. Her novels have been featured on The Today Show, CNN and NPR, and in Cosmo, Vanity Fair, Bust, Time Out, Oprah Summer Reads and other national publications. Jessica's short stories and essays have been published in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies. Jessica co-wrote the script for Love on the Run starring Frances Fisher and Steve Howey. She sometimes works as a ghost writer and has taught writing at Johns Hopkins University, Goucher College and The Fashion Institute of Technology. Jessica lives in New York.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; Original edition (January 18, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 337 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061984027
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061984020
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 8.09 x 5.31 x 0.92 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,277,579 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #13,770 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #15,349 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
- #16,862 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
THE WONDER BREAD SUMMER, Jessica Anya Blau's third novel, was featured on NPR's All Things Considered as a Thrilling Summer Read. Oprah.com's book club picked THE WONDER BREAD SUMMER as a Thrilling Beach Read. CNN featured THE WONDER BREAD SUMMER as a Best Beach Read.
Jessica Anya Blau's second novel, DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME, was featured in Target stores Breakout Author series. Novelist Irina Reyn calls it, "Unrelentingly, sidesplittingly funny." The Austin Chronicle says that, "The domestic relationships in the book are brilliantly rendered, a contemporary California version of Philip Roth." Author Dylan Landis says the book is, "So raw and funny I wanted to read parts aloud to strangers."
Jessica'a first novel, THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES, was chosen as a Top Ten Summer Read by the Today Show, The New York Post and New York Magazine. Cosmo called it a "Sexy Summer Read!" The San Francisco Chronicle and the Rocky Mountain News chose THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES as a Best Book of the Year.
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In Drinking Closer to Home, Jessica Anya Blau shows us that dysfunction we get from our parents are only their reactions to the dysfunction they got from their parents. I enjoyed this book, if only because it made me feel like the dysfunction I inherited from my parents isn't nearly as bad as what Buzzy and Louise passed down to their children.
Anna, Portia and Emery are the adult children of Buzzy and Louise who descend on their Santa Barbara ranch when Louise suffers a massive heart attack. The spend the time reminiscing, remember the hurts and triumphs of their lives, from childhood to the near-past.
The family starts off as a upper-middle class family in Ann Arbor, Michigan, living in the kind of neighborhood that is so normal it has to be abnormal behind closed doors. And it is, although Buzzy and Louise seem to be the most normal--at least at that time.
The family packs up and moves across the country for Buzzy's career, landing in California. They move into a picture perfect house with a pool and a lemon orchard. All is wonderful until the moment Louise "quits" as a mom. She quits cleaning, cooking, doing laundry and caring for the children, including baby Emery, whose care she entrusts to Portia. All the children grow up dirty--I think this is what got me the most. Louise begins 'etching' and writing poetry, and Buzzy cultivates marijuana, something he takes great pride in but doesn't smoke. He leaves that to Louise.
I think this is where the book lost my heart. I did not like Louise very much until she is much older. She lives in a completely self-centered world, dropping motherhood like it was an adult education class. Those of us that are mothers may drop responsibilities for a day or two, but could never abandon my children to themselves to indulge my whims. And Buzzy lets it happen. It seems with the money he makes he could hire a nanny/housekeeper, but he just leaves the kids to fend for themselves. And Emery grows up without a mother or a father.
We meet Buzzy's parents, an Orthodox Jewish family who comes to California once a year. They love the girls and Louise (who converted for the marriage and was Sarah for awhile and is the best Kosher cook they know), and really cannot stand poor Emery. This is the only time the house is orderly and clean, an act put on purely for Zeyde and Bubbe.
We also meet Louise's parents, a couple that lives in bucolic Vermont (I love the vision of their house). They are portrayed as completely backasswards, but you kind of like them for it. Otto, Louise's dad, believes that all children born after the first are only backups in case something happens to the oldest, so all the love and affection is poured into the oldest. Anna is adored, Portia is tolerated and Emery is ignored.
As we go through the children's lives and arrive at their adult selves, we realize that the more attention the children got from their parents and grandparents the more screwed up they are. Anna is really a mess, Portia less so (really desperate for love and attention, but in a healthy? way) and Emery is the most stable (probably because he never had any attention or any need of it, he embraced his homosexuality and made it fit into his life in a time when it wasn't quite as acceptable).
I guess if Buzzy and especially Louise were checked though out, they all would have been a little more functional.
That said, the ending is very poignant and did make me laugh and tear up. They are a family and come together when necessary, although PLEASE tell me I haven't messed up my kids this bad.
The characters are well developed and you do care about them. They reminisce with humor and emotion. Again, I liked this book. I just couldn't get past Louise's total lack of motherly feelings--and this brought the book down a notch.
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It was amazing!
It took me a while to finish, not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because I have been crazy busy lately with a ton of stuff. My daughter made me look bad last weekend by reading Jessica's first book in two short days, and loving every minute of it. She headed back to college with the second loaded up on her I-phone (I know, only the young can read novels on an I-phone, right?). Jessica had sent me her first published novel (also on Amazon), called "The Summer of Naked Swim Parties" (how sweet is that, especially after I paid only $1.99 for the second one on Amazon!). Way to go. Way to go.
Anyway, I digress. "Drinking Closer to Home" made me feel so much more comfortable about my own family of origin. I love the family that Blau writes about. They are so close, despite so much dysfunction (I know, I know, every family is dysfunctional, but they are not all so close and loving). I want this family. My family never talked about anything. There were problems to discuss, but I was the only one who wanted to talk. I wanted to be close to my brothers, but they had no interest in me. I'm not suggesting that the family in "Drinking Closer to Home" shares all of the same interests, but they do share a commonality, which is their family. Surely this should be enough for all of us.
Read this book. The characters are so well developed, and they all have a voice throughout. We are woven from present day back in time, in and out, in and out. I don't want to spoil anything, but anyone who has been in a family will find something to like, and I think we've all been in some kind of family or other. I mean what is a family, really, other than a gathering of people who live together? Think foster homes, adoptions, communes.
Let's talk about affairs, and nudity, and addiction, and homosexuality, marriages going through their ups and downs, and serious illness. Let's talk about creating our own families, and maybe not doing all that much better than our parents did.
I loved "Drinking Closer to Home". My daughter and I are jonesing for the next novel by Jessica Anya Blau, and guess what? It's being published next summer by Harper & Collins! So get ready by ready the first two. I'm going to start on "The Summer of Naked Swim Parties" as soon as I do my required Book Club meeting. Jessica has even offered to join our group if we read one of her books. She skypes in!
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'Drinking Closer to Home' is the story of Anna, Portia and Emery, whose parents Buzz (or is it Buzzy? Can't remember - seems a pretty weird name either way) and Louise moved to California in search of art and liberty while the children were small. To begin with, they led a fairly conventional life - Buzzy working as a lawyer, Louise primarily a housewife. Then, when Anna, the eldest child was about eleven, Louise declared that she was not going to do anything for the family any more, but was going to become a poet and artist. The children were left to their own devices, and if Buzzy felt this was unfair he was too busy earning money as a lawyer and smoking dope to do anything about it. Louise's decision meant that the family slowly came to pieces. Anna started off responsible and hard-working, cooking dinner for the family, and making sure that she at least had clean clothes and a tidy room. But this all came to an end when she discovered boys and drugs as a teenager, and began to go off the rails. Portia (who simply lived in filth after her mother stopped cleaning) did a little better, due to her inability to drink much without vomiting, but she too started going down the route of unstable boyfriends and too many drugs. Despite everything, the girls got to good colleges (Anna to Bennington, Portia to Berkeley) but they didn't seem interested in work - or anything else - once they got there, and just carried on repeating the drink, drugs and boys formula. Only little Emery, the child who never had real mothering, did OK, working hard, avoiding substances, and - after a period with a thoroughly nice girlfriend - deciding quietly that he was gay and switching to boys. Descriptions of the children's childhood, adolescence and twenties (where things got worse for Anna, who became a drug addict for a while, then better when she became a police woman; things got worse altogether for Portia who made a terrible marriage; and things got better for Emery who found a lovely boyfriend in Alejandro) alternate with a present-day story in which all the children are summoned to the bedside of Louise, who's had a mild heart attack, and bicker and make-up extravagantly either at her bedside or at home, while Emery tries to pluck up the courage to persuade his one of his sisters to become a donor for his child, Anna broods on her affair and Portia on her divorce - and everyone makes spectacularly unfunny wisecracks. It's pretty monotonous stuff, and the sentimental tearjerker ending gratuitously tacked on to bring this unstable family to their story's end just feels tasteless.
I assumed (partly because the publisher, Harper Perennial, usually produces excellent books) that this was a witty and compassionate satire on liberal American life. In fact, it's a very unfunny and rambling saga, filled with repetitive anecdotes and tasteless stories (the brief incident of animal cruelty is bad enough, but the story of how Louise's parents left her in infanthood in a car in the depth of winter while they got drunk, and how she nearly died as the window was open is just appalling). The multiple wisecracks are trying so hard for 'outrageous wit' that they just seem laboured. There are some frankly unbelievable scenes - the supposedly Orthodox Jewish grandparents inspecting their granddaughters' underwear, for example. Pretty well everyone is dislikeable: both sets of grandparents are vulgar, and Louise's downright abusive; Buzzy is weak; Louise is crazy, though at least shows some creative energy; Anna is a depressed narcissist; Portia is stupid and whiney. Only Emery and Alejandro seem likeable and normal, despite their weird obsession with cartoons. One can't help feeling that they will be much better parents than Anna or Portia. And there's no real plot - sitting bickering at Mum's bedside for days in one plot strand, and getting drunk and taking drugs over and over again in the other does not a good story make. I didn't feel in the end we learnt much about family life, or how families can interact beneficially, everyone remained immature, and the significance of the title escaped me. This book was basically an unfunny psychological void.
Then again - I did feel moments of tenderness for Emery and Alejandro, Blau clearly likes animals, and there were brief moments of genuine humour - Louise's pragmatic father's unimpressed reaction to her lithographs, for example - and compassion - Anna's decision to train as a cop, and change her life - that really worked. I think that Blau probably can write really well, but the grotesquerie of this novel and the characters' shallowness really put me off in the end. Not sure I'd try another of her books.