| Author/Contributor(s): | Christensen, Kate |
| Publisher: | Harper Perennial |
| Date: | 6/15/2027 |
| Binding: | Paperback |
| Condition: | NEW |
“Caustic.”—New York Magazine, Highbrow Brilliant
“A ninja takedown of toxic literary hypocrisy”—Booklist
From the brilliant Kate Christensen, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Great Man, comes a compelling, searing novel about women, sex, power, and self-reckoning.
Ever since her father broke her heart when she was nine, Julia Heimdahl has tried to be good company for bad men: A jovial drinking companion; an easygoing, witty noncomplainer; one of the boys. Now a literary novelist in late middle age and late mid-career, she is at a moment of crisis, although she doesn’t know it yet.
The novel takes place over the course of a weekend-long book festival at Baldwin College, which happens to be Julia’s alma mater, where she has come to promote her recently published memoir. She’s been placed on a panel with a fellow memoirist named Ellis Blackwell, a man so outrageously flirtatious and fawningly flattering that Julia is almost too disarmed to recognize how dangerous he is.
Interweaving excerpts from Julia’s memoir with her encounters with important people from her past—the woman she had a crush on in college, her old New York mentor, her editor, her literary nemesis, a former graduate student—Good Company examines what it really means to be “good company” as Julia faces her demons and comes to terms with what she truly wants from sex, life, and work.