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Chapters (29)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-one
  25. Twenty-two
  26. Twenty-three
  27. Twenty-four
  28. Twenty-five
  29. Acknowledgments

By the same author

The Man of the House

The Easy Way Out

The Object of My Affection

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Title Page

Images

Dedication

For Sebastian Stuart and Lesli Gordon

True Enough

One

Things to Do

In the course of one week, Anderton went from unknown lounge singer to Decca recording artist. “One morning me and the kids are having coffee,” she told Look magazine in 1961, “and a record producer calls and says he wants to cut a demo. That phone call gave me a whole new life, even though nothing changed.”

From Cry Me a River:
The Lives of Pauline Anderton by Desmond Sullivan

1.

Jane Cody kept lists—Things To Do, Things To Buy, Bills To Pay, Appointments To Keep—but because she knew they provided the kind of irrefutable paper trail that almost always got people into trouble at tawdry junctures in their lives, her lists weren’t the literal truth. Some inaccuracies were alibis in case the reminders fell into the wrong hands, while others were there to mislead the people who were likely to read them. It was a simple system that caused her problems only when she confused the code and started missing dental appointments and showing up at restaurants for imaginary lunches, both of which had happened in the past three weeks. Obviously, she’d been working too hard, unless maybe she hadn’t been working enough.

She was sitting at her desk poring over tomorrow’s notes to herself to stave off the anxiety attack she could feel brewing in the back of her brain, building in strength like one of the many tropical storms currently approaching adulthood somewhere in the South Atlantic. (The topic of a recent doomladen conversation on the show she produced: Another Storm of the Century?) It had been a bad morning—an argument with her son and a volleyball game of passive-aggressive selflessness with her husband—and then the chocolates one of her co-workers had brought in proved disappointing and the carefully arranged plans for this afternoon’s taping of the show had started to unravel. At moments like these, she wished she hadn’t tried to impress her shrink by agreeing with him that tranquilizers and antidepressants were grossly overprescribed. Why did she go out of her way to impress Dr. Berman? She was paying him $130 an hour, which ought to be enough to buy his approval, no matter what her opinions.