WORKS BY PATTY FRIEDMANN

Coming April 2007

Eleanor Rushing is back—transforming herself with cosmetic surgery and falling in love with all the wrong men while Katrina ravages New Orleans.

It’s been seven years, and Eleanor Rushing is still waiting for Maxim Walters, the love of her life, to leave his wife and move into her rambling mansion on St. Charles Avenue. But when she meets Dr. Richard Kimball—tall, dark, handsome, and a plastic surgeon—her life takes on a whole new direction. Smitten, she decides to go under his knife to alter her looks, and her life. But the summer of 2005 has other plans in store and Hurricane Katrina interrupts Eleanor’s transformation.

As the water rises, self-absorbed Eleanor, thinking only skin deep, floats on the surface of the disaster. She and her longtime housekeeper Naomi wade through the flooded streets of New Orleans, and wind up in Houston along with Dr. Kimball, who gives Eleanor more plastic surgery. This time the result is hideous. Eleanor returns to New Orleans with a body as wrecked as the city and neither will ever be the same.

In this tragicomic novel, Patty Friedmann deftly exposes the damaged and tenuously intact faces of New Orleans. In her often hilarious and always singular style, Friedmann helps us to understand that transformation is probably the most difficult image to process—especially when change has been wrought by someone or something beyond our control.

Coming March 2007 SIDE EFFECTS A New Orleans Love Story Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007 Purchase the paperback edition now through Amazon.com, Booksense, or Barnes & Noble.

Praise for Side Effects:

"Friedmann, a fiercely idiosyncratic writer with a wicked sense of humor, will make readers feel anew the joys of friendship, the lure of romance, and the satisfaction of seeing bullies get their comeuppance." —Booklist

"Friedmann's charming story (after Secondhand Smoke) of the unlikely affection among three diverse co-workers at a New Orleans pharmacy also now reads as a tribute to a unique American city that will never be the same." —Publishers Weekly

"It is about 'having the faith and keeping it, too' and a reminder of what is best about New Orleans….In this time of rebuilding and rethinking our city, ‘Side Effects’ is salutary and bracing indeed, just the Rx for what ails us." —Times-Picayune

New Orleans’s idiosyncrasies have been embraced by the world: Patty Friedmann gives us a tender, hilarious portrait of them in her new novel Side Effects. Set in N.O. Drugstore where hardscrabble black Pigeontown meets stuffy white Tulane, Side Effects is peopled with the true New Orleans oddballs who scuffle between the Seasonal Specials and Depends aisles—all in full view of the pharmacy staff. Proudly plump blonde Luciana Jambon, dreadlocked and neatly compulsive Lennon Israel, and up-from-the-‘hood Vendetta Greene have their own dramas of romance and friendship. 

A wacky and suspenseful story of family conflict and a death under suspicious circumstances, Side Effects serves most as a comical reminder that New Orleans loves nothing more than to laugh at itself.

SECONDHAND SMOKE
Counterpoint Press/Basic Books, 2002
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Praise for Secondhand Smoke:

"A Confederacy of Dunces meets The Corrections...Both funny and sad, this novel deserves the wild popularity it is sure to achieve." —Library Journal

"I hate Patty Friedmann... because she has magic in the nib of her pen. Fire and magic." —Silas House, author of Clay's Quilt

"Flows like cold water down a patched throat...Her readers are thirsty for this one, and they won't be disappointed." —Critique

Jerusha Bailey (known as Ru to her friends, of which there are precious few) won’t stop smoking, no matter what health reports from the Wall Street Journal her daughter Zib sends her way. Instead, Jerusha puffs up a storm while her long-suffering husband, Woodrow, dies slowly in the next room of a brain tumor one sultry New Orleans summer. And anyway, as far as Jerusha is concerned, Zib–assistant manager at a Florida Winn-Dixie–and her brother Wilson–a professor in Chicago–are both as useless and cocky as the day is long.

When Woodrow dies, Jerusha is left to stalk about their small shabby house, loathing the welfare mother living next door but developing a grudging affection for the woman’s ten-year-old son. A fire leaves Jerusha homeless, drawing her into a complicated relationship with this little boy, as well as with her own two children, teaching them all the hard way about family bonds, responsibility, and love.

ELEANOR RUSHING
A Novel
Counterpoint Press, 1999
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Praise for Eleanor Rushing:

"Expertly, gracefully, Patty Friedmann overlays topographies of loss and desire, reality and delusion, making fiction as strange-and as sad and funny-as truth." —Kathryn Harrison, author of The Kiss

“A dazzling novel, capturing that complex mix of lightness and darkness that is New Orleans.” —Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

"Brilliant, bitterly funny, and deeply scary.…The reader is seduced by that willful voice, wavering between shock and grudging admiration at Friedmann's high-wire balancing act. And laughing all the way." —New Orleans Times-Picayune

"Intriguing and touching…One finishes the book impressed by Friedmann's wit and her compassion for human frailty." —Publishers Weekly

Eleanor Rushing is a first-person narrative tour de force. While Eleanor is blessed with acute powers of observation and the ability to remember everything, her recollections and impressions are nevertheless often at odds with those of the people around her. As her "relationship" with a local married Methodist minister spins out of control, the loquacious and endearing Eleanor manages to charm us completely. Even as we begin to realize that surviving a childhood marred by tragedy has exacted a terrible toll, we can't help being her willing and faithful admirers.

ODDS
Counterpoint Press, 2001
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Praise for Odds:

“There is a warmth, sweetness, and humor about this novel that hooks the reader early on, and Friedmann’s insights into domestic discord will ring many a marital bell. Her quirky imagination, bolstered by striking images and witty asides, grant this novel a potent immediacy.” —Publishers Weekly

“These are dark subjects, certainly, but Friedmann’s caustic style is hilariously funny.” —Booklist

“A novel with a fierce grip on the heart, Odds is tender but unflinching, sad but funny, a story of devotion as well as betrayal. Patty Friedmann writes with tremendous wit, wisdom, and a marksman’s eye for the telling details of human behavior.” —Carrie Brown, author of Lamb in Love

"Coincidences abound along the way.... What are the odds? In this elegant and unusual novel, they are very good indeed." —Deborah Sussman Susser, The New York Times Book Review

"Friedmann's latest subject is brilliant, bitterly funny, and deeply scary.... The reader is seduced by that willful voice, wavering between shock and grudging admiration at Friedmann's high-wire balancing act. And laughing all the way." —Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune

Anna Riggs Duffy and her husband, George, live in New Orleans with their two very different identical twins. One day there is a tragic accident, and Anna can save only one of the boys. In their grief, George turns to another woman while Anna turns to the slot machines in the waterfront casinos. How will she win George back, and does she really want to, anyway? In Odds, Patty Friedmann explores the darker sides of humor, love, and family.

THE EXACT IMAGE OF MOTHER
Viking Penguin, 1991
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Praise for The Exact Image of Mother:

"An oddball debut novel: the strong point of The Exact Image of Mother is its variety of distinctly rendered voices." —New York Times

Narrated by the wisecracking survivor of Jewish guilt, Holocaust memories, and complicated modern romance, a beguiling dark comedy of mothers and daughters, love and betrayal, death, renewal, and unexpected luck.

TOO SMART TO BE RICH
New Chapter Press, 1988
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A cult classic, syndicated by the New York Times: the handbook for the yuffie, “young urban failure.”