Authors: Anna Maxted
Getting Over It (38 page)
Publication Information
About
Getting Over It
“Lost love can be gotten over, and grief survived, but the infectious snarky voice-overs of Anna Maxted’s endearing heroine may well prove habit-forming. Get
Getting Over It,
and then see if you can.”
—
Gregory Maguire, author of
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
and
Wicked
“Witty and Clever… Compelling, humane, and worryingly funny. The difference between Maxted’s novel and her would-be peers is honesty.”
—
Evening Standard
(London)
“Breezy and subversive, but with a heart of vulnerability.
Getting Over It
never loses its humor or its warmth—a great achievement. I loved it!”
—Marian Keyes, author of
Watermelon
and
Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married
“A charming and compelling debut.”
—Suzanne Finnamore, author of
Otherwise Engaged
“Maybe it will be good for you to be on your own for a bit.”
“Why?” I say in a bored tone.
Lizzy dabs her mouth with her napkin (her perfect lipstick remains perfect) and declares, “You’ve got to be happy alone before you can be happy with someone.”
“Liz,” I say, “did you read that in GirlTime?”
“I might have,” says Lizzy airily. “So?”
“I wrote it.”
Wickedly funny and unfailingly honest,
Getting Over It
charts the misadventures of Helen Bradshaw, a caustically charming twenty-something who isn’t exactly living out her dreams. She’s a lowly assistant editor at
GirlTime
magazine, drives an ancient Toyota, and has a history of choosing men who fall several thousand feet below acceptable boyfriend standard. Not to mention that she shares an apartment with a scruffy, tactless roommate, her best girlfriends are a little too perfect, and the most affectionate male in her life—her cat, Fatboy—occasionally pees in her underwear drawer.
Then Helen gets the telephone call she least expects: Her father has had a massive heart attack. Initially brushing off his death as merely an interruption in her already chaotic life (they were never very close, after all), Helen is surprised to find everything else starting to crumble around her. Her pushy mother is coming apart at the seams, a close friend might be heading toward tragedy, and, after the tequila incident, it looks as though Tom the vet will be sticking with Dalmatians. Turns out getting over it isn’t going to be quite as easy as she thought.
Hilarious, wise, and compulsively readable,
Getting Over it
marks the debut of one of the freshest, boldest new voices in women’s fiction.
A
NNA
M
AXTED
is a UK contributing editor at
Cosmopolitan
and a columnist for
Esquire.
Jacket design © 2000 by Glenn O’Neill
Jacket photograph © 2000 by Nigel Attard
Author photograph © by Times Newspapers Limited
ReganBooks
An Imprint of
HarperCollins
Publishers
Copyright Notice
GETTING OVER IT. Copyright © 2000 by Anna Maxted. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information address HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
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FIRST EDITION
Designed by Pagesetters, Inc.
Printed on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 0-06-039320-3
eBook Version Notes
v1.0 March 2005 – Desktop & PocketPC .lit
Scan, conversion, and proofing.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Publication Information
About Getting Over It
Copyright Notice
eBook Version Notes