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Now You See Her
"Graceful...Poetic...Otto's voice is sympathetic and direct, her imagination equally practical and romantic."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer
"ENCHANTING...ASTONISHING AND LOVELY."
--Entertainment Weekly
Kiki Shaw, a game show question writer, is about to turn forty. She doesn't mind that, except that she's also disappearing. Parts of her that were always there are vanishing, and no one seems to notice. As she contemplates this experience, Kiki makes certain discoveries about her life and those of the women closest to her. Perhaps they will all evanesce bit by bit, until they detect where they misplaced themselves and their once-promising lives (.
As she did in her New York Times bestseller, How to Make an American Quilt, Whitney Otto has created a rich gallery of voices and lives that draws us in and pierces our perceptions of who we are or should be.
"The sight of a work and talent in progress is welcome in the House of Fiction."
--The New York Times
"You are in the hands of a master. Now sit back and enjoy it."
--The Hartford Courant
"[This] gradually, even magically, unfolds to yield another of Otto's intricate, intimate tapestries."
--Publishers Weekly
--The Philadelphia Inquirer
"ENCHANTING...ASTONISHING AND LOVELY."
--Entertainment Weekly
Kiki Shaw, a game show question writer, is about to turn forty. She doesn't mind that, except that she's also disappearing. Parts of her that were always there are vanishing, and no one seems to notice. As she contemplates this experience, Kiki makes certain discoveries about her life and those of the women closest to her. Perhaps they will all evanesce bit by bit, until they detect where they misplaced themselves and their once-promising lives (.
As she did in her New York Times bestseller, How to Make an American Quilt, Whitney Otto has created a rich gallery of voices and lives that draws us in and pierces our perceptions of who we are or should be.
"The sight of a work and talent in progress is welcome in the House of Fiction."
--The New York Times
"You are in the hands of a master. Now sit back and enjoy it."
--The Hartford Courant
"[This] gradually, even magically, unfolds to yield another of Otto's intricate, intimate tapestries."
--Publishers Weekly
- GenresFictionContemporary
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
About the author
Whitney Otto
24 books99 followersWhitney Otto is the bestselling author of How to Make an American Quilt (which was made into a feature film), Now You See Her, and The Passion Dream Book. A native of California, she lives with her husband and son in Portland, Oregon.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
May 5, 2009
I just wanted this book to be over with. The plot was not strong enough to hold my interest and it jumped all over the place... too abstract- totally disappointing.
August 31, 2015
This book hurt my brain! Author Whitney Otto definitely expected me to step up my game and follow all the loose threads. Which I did but this novel took me almost two months to finish! It was beautifully written and unlike anything I've read before. But I will never read it again.
And because of that, here are the passages I want to remember:
Walt said: When my boy is gone people will drive by my house and will know that a tragedy has been visited upon it. They will be sympathetic and well meaning and after a while they will gently suggest that our lives continue. These people who have not lost a three-year-old boy. This is what they will say, Your lives are long and you have other things to think about. They will point out that Kiki needs to be attended to. And, when time has past, it will come clear that what they were saying was that their lives must go on and they do not wish to continue to grieve for the neighbor boy who passed on too early for anyone's comfort. They do not want to be reminded that life is unpredictable and a puzzle and occasionally unjust and that whatever happened next door or across the street or down the road somehow skipped their house and that is what they do not want to think about. Their house was passed over without understanding why one is saved from sorrow; and without understanding why, one cannot guard against such events. My little marked house and my little identified family, thought Walt. We are less like friends in the neighborhood and more like a warning not to take anything for granted. But, christ, there is so much effort in living a life not taken for granted. It wears the body right out.
***
"Look," said Kiki, "I'm not sure about how the twenties are to be spent, but I think thirty is like a second adolescence, that Awkward Age. All I remember thinking when I was growing up was what my thirties would be like; then I'm there and it is not at all what I pictured. Like when we were sixteen and thought we should resemble some blossoming starlet, only all I looked like was me, and all you looked like was you - it was us, only strangely us."
***
A mother. As if she were being transformed externally when inside she still feels exactly like herself, only motherhood makes Les a little happier. She used to receive the usual compliments: glowing skin, thicker hair, she smiled more freely. A mother; as if she were no longer Les, stripped of her sexuality, a certain element of her femininity. And bringing a baby into a culture that, she is beginning to believe, does not really like children and only tolerates them and keeps finding new ways to be unkind. God forbid she has the kids in public - a store, a restaurant, a movie, a park - and they begin Acting Like Children, all noise and motion and Les really is The Mother who should be controlling her kids and sometimes she gets so tense about it that she develops a terrible headache and they all have to leave wherever they are anyway.
***
People like the notion of Mother. Even if she were a CEO she imagined being asked, until she turned forty, if she was "considering children." But how can someone be lauded for a natural act of her own biology? And how can a woman be made to feel "less" if she cannot have or does not want a baby? Some say things have changed; Les is not entirely convinced. One of the most subversive things she can do is to confess to not understanding the large number of women who will do anything to have a child. She does not think she is missing the point. It just seems to her that women are praised for that which they cannot control and punished for the same.
***
She is, however, utterly bored with her job. What would she do if she did not work here? Her skills, such as they are, are definitely limited and this job has only prepared her for other, similar jobs, and if she is going to find a similar job, then why not stay put? At least she has a few years here; likes her co-workers fine; and she has begun to wonder if her disappearing isn't somehow her body's response to anxiety. Maybe about this birthday, maybe her life in general. Why isn't she further along or more established at this point in her life?
***
Nora is a frugal girl and has always saved faithfully. For what? The disaster that will devastate her? The rainy day that, thankfully, does not come? And suddenly she is overcome, sitting at her desk, in her office, which lies in proximity to her boss's, finds tears falling and spreading, caught on the papers before her. She is coming apart so slowly, so expertly that even her closest friends cannot detect the unraveling. Her hand brushes aside the unexpected tears; silly, years ago she traveled through Australia and New Zealand all by herself with her backpack and limited funds. She dismisses the memory. I was so much younger then. I could do that sort of thing. What has changed? she wonders. Shouldn't I be even more capable of taking a trip like that now that I am older? Aren't we supposed to grow and learn and become even more versed in life as we age? Traveling alone could be a proving ground of all we have accumulated in our thinking lives. When, she wonders, did aging turn into a reversing of adulthood? It seemed one day she was a child who could not manage such a vacation alone without a parent, and the next she was closing in on middle age, stumbling over these strange roadblocks that seemed to appear from nowhere. Why can't she travel unescorted? Fear and rebellion have dug into her chest, holding fast. They tell her that people are entitled to that sort of vagabond freedom when they are young; that she must be a grown-up; that it is correct for her to work; that she should resist the impulse to look back. And if she chose not to marry or have children (which still makes her an anomaly, though she does not know why), then shouldn't she at least have a big career or freedom or fun? Somehow, in between the time she took off on that jet bound for Sydney, making her way around Australia, on her own, no need or use for well-meaning "help," and today, at her desk, something had happened to her. It was as if her life had been reduced to a clear, sharp triangle: the movement up (traveling alone at the apex) and, almost without pause, the pull back downward.
***
Nora is aware of an odd, uncomfortable gray area in the workplace; since she cannot reconcile herself to it, she wants to flee it. Her reasoning runs along this line: Someone kids you about some "woman thing," knowing you will not find it terribly amusing. You react seriously. They turn around and say, Geez, can't you take a joke? And if you don't react to something that, for you, is not a laughing matter, are you betraying some fundamental part of yourself; allowing yourself to be the butt of a joke you don't find funny? This is the old I'll-get-you-coming-and-going. Nora feels there is another version of this in her company. If you oppose the men in charge, you are not a good sport. You are, in fact, Too Serious, verging on Bitch Material. Now, if you ride the crest, tell yourself that it is for the long-term reward; the greater good; that you are not "political"; that it really, really, doesn't matter that much to you; that you like men; that you Can Take It and are as much of a man as they are (more so, really, what do they "take"?); that you won't be there forever; that you generally follow the path of least resistance; that if you take the heat it will probably make it easier for you, and won't matter to anyone else over a period of time; that your boss is as good as one can expect and who's to say a woman is a better choice? You can dream up a million approaches; you can try to ignore that small, nagging, not-so-vague instinctual presence; you can tell yourself that now you will be accepted into the boys' club. After all, you stood steadfast against your natural impulses, laughed at yourself; and don't you deserve some kind of reward? The answer, Nora discovered, having attempted this tack on her own, is no. You will never get into the club. Never.
***
She was growing tired of waiting; so, so tired of her own life, and this seemed to her horrible; to be so overcome by one's own life. She would drag home, exhausted from her job, and awaken in the morning as if she had not slept at all, wondering if this was what her life was meant to be; not everyone, she reasoned, was lucky.
***
Take work: What exactly is a forty-hour week? Who decided that was the amount needed to complete our daily tasks? Forgetting, of course, that we all have different jobs and that we do not all possess the same skills to perform each task yet we are allotted the same amount of time. Also arbitrary is the notion that "free time" (retirement) after the age of sixty-five is the same thing as free time at thirty-five or forty-five; that we are somehow unchanged as people. Our children are grown, our vigor altered, it would make sense that, at sixty-five, we are finally ready to settle down to a nice peaceful desk job, or to fall into the soothing routine of the workplace. Instead, people are expected, during youth and active middle age, to be happy punching a time clock; that restlessness or resistance is cause for guilt. If one walks away from it all, he is called lazy by family and friends. Why is it that if a person does not wish to spend the young years of his life sealed in an office building, he is labeled lazy, undirected, without goals and who do you think is going to take care of you, Mr. I'm-too-good-to-work-for-a-living-like-my-father-before-me-and-his-father-before-him? Just who do you think you are? Well. Maybe you know who you are and that was the thing that made it simple to walk away.
And because of that, here are the passages I want to remember:
Walt said: When my boy is gone people will drive by my house and will know that a tragedy has been visited upon it. They will be sympathetic and well meaning and after a while they will gently suggest that our lives continue. These people who have not lost a three-year-old boy. This is what they will say, Your lives are long and you have other things to think about. They will point out that Kiki needs to be attended to. And, when time has past, it will come clear that what they were saying was that their lives must go on and they do not wish to continue to grieve for the neighbor boy who passed on too early for anyone's comfort. They do not want to be reminded that life is unpredictable and a puzzle and occasionally unjust and that whatever happened next door or across the street or down the road somehow skipped their house and that is what they do not want to think about. Their house was passed over without understanding why one is saved from sorrow; and without understanding why, one cannot guard against such events. My little marked house and my little identified family, thought Walt. We are less like friends in the neighborhood and more like a warning not to take anything for granted. But, christ, there is so much effort in living a life not taken for granted. It wears the body right out.
***
"Look," said Kiki, "I'm not sure about how the twenties are to be spent, but I think thirty is like a second adolescence, that Awkward Age. All I remember thinking when I was growing up was what my thirties would be like; then I'm there and it is not at all what I pictured. Like when we were sixteen and thought we should resemble some blossoming starlet, only all I looked like was me, and all you looked like was you - it was us, only strangely us."
***
A mother. As if she were being transformed externally when inside she still feels exactly like herself, only motherhood makes Les a little happier. She used to receive the usual compliments: glowing skin, thicker hair, she smiled more freely. A mother; as if she were no longer Les, stripped of her sexuality, a certain element of her femininity. And bringing a baby into a culture that, she is beginning to believe, does not really like children and only tolerates them and keeps finding new ways to be unkind. God forbid she has the kids in public - a store, a restaurant, a movie, a park - and they begin Acting Like Children, all noise and motion and Les really is The Mother who should be controlling her kids and sometimes she gets so tense about it that she develops a terrible headache and they all have to leave wherever they are anyway.
***
People like the notion of Mother. Even if she were a CEO she imagined being asked, until she turned forty, if she was "considering children." But how can someone be lauded for a natural act of her own biology? And how can a woman be made to feel "less" if she cannot have or does not want a baby? Some say things have changed; Les is not entirely convinced. One of the most subversive things she can do is to confess to not understanding the large number of women who will do anything to have a child. She does not think she is missing the point. It just seems to her that women are praised for that which they cannot control and punished for the same.
***
She is, however, utterly bored with her job. What would she do if she did not work here? Her skills, such as they are, are definitely limited and this job has only prepared her for other, similar jobs, and if she is going to find a similar job, then why not stay put? At least she has a few years here; likes her co-workers fine; and she has begun to wonder if her disappearing isn't somehow her body's response to anxiety. Maybe about this birthday, maybe her life in general. Why isn't she further along or more established at this point in her life?
***
Nora is a frugal girl and has always saved faithfully. For what? The disaster that will devastate her? The rainy day that, thankfully, does not come? And suddenly she is overcome, sitting at her desk, in her office, which lies in proximity to her boss's, finds tears falling and spreading, caught on the papers before her. She is coming apart so slowly, so expertly that even her closest friends cannot detect the unraveling. Her hand brushes aside the unexpected tears; silly, years ago she traveled through Australia and New Zealand all by herself with her backpack and limited funds. She dismisses the memory. I was so much younger then. I could do that sort of thing. What has changed? she wonders. Shouldn't I be even more capable of taking a trip like that now that I am older? Aren't we supposed to grow and learn and become even more versed in life as we age? Traveling alone could be a proving ground of all we have accumulated in our thinking lives. When, she wonders, did aging turn into a reversing of adulthood? It seemed one day she was a child who could not manage such a vacation alone without a parent, and the next she was closing in on middle age, stumbling over these strange roadblocks that seemed to appear from nowhere. Why can't she travel unescorted? Fear and rebellion have dug into her chest, holding fast. They tell her that people are entitled to that sort of vagabond freedom when they are young; that she must be a grown-up; that it is correct for her to work; that she should resist the impulse to look back. And if she chose not to marry or have children (which still makes her an anomaly, though she does not know why), then shouldn't she at least have a big career or freedom or fun? Somehow, in between the time she took off on that jet bound for Sydney, making her way around Australia, on her own, no need or use for well-meaning "help," and today, at her desk, something had happened to her. It was as if her life had been reduced to a clear, sharp triangle: the movement up (traveling alone at the apex) and, almost without pause, the pull back downward.
***
Nora is aware of an odd, uncomfortable gray area in the workplace; since she cannot reconcile herself to it, she wants to flee it. Her reasoning runs along this line: Someone kids you about some "woman thing," knowing you will not find it terribly amusing. You react seriously. They turn around and say, Geez, can't you take a joke? And if you don't react to something that, for you, is not a laughing matter, are you betraying some fundamental part of yourself; allowing yourself to be the butt of a joke you don't find funny? This is the old I'll-get-you-coming-and-going. Nora feels there is another version of this in her company. If you oppose the men in charge, you are not a good sport. You are, in fact, Too Serious, verging on Bitch Material. Now, if you ride the crest, tell yourself that it is for the long-term reward; the greater good; that you are not "political"; that it really, really, doesn't matter that much to you; that you like men; that you Can Take It and are as much of a man as they are (more so, really, what do they "take"?); that you won't be there forever; that you generally follow the path of least resistance; that if you take the heat it will probably make it easier for you, and won't matter to anyone else over a period of time; that your boss is as good as one can expect and who's to say a woman is a better choice? You can dream up a million approaches; you can try to ignore that small, nagging, not-so-vague instinctual presence; you can tell yourself that now you will be accepted into the boys' club. After all, you stood steadfast against your natural impulses, laughed at yourself; and don't you deserve some kind of reward? The answer, Nora discovered, having attempted this tack on her own, is no. You will never get into the club. Never.
***
She was growing tired of waiting; so, so tired of her own life, and this seemed to her horrible; to be so overcome by one's own life. She would drag home, exhausted from her job, and awaken in the morning as if she had not slept at all, wondering if this was what her life was meant to be; not everyone, she reasoned, was lucky.
***
Take work: What exactly is a forty-hour week? Who decided that was the amount needed to complete our daily tasks? Forgetting, of course, that we all have different jobs and that we do not all possess the same skills to perform each task yet we are allotted the same amount of time. Also arbitrary is the notion that "free time" (retirement) after the age of sixty-five is the same thing as free time at thirty-five or forty-five; that we are somehow unchanged as people. Our children are grown, our vigor altered, it would make sense that, at sixty-five, we are finally ready to settle down to a nice peaceful desk job, or to fall into the soothing routine of the workplace. Instead, people are expected, during youth and active middle age, to be happy punching a time clock; that restlessness or resistance is cause for guilt. If one walks away from it all, he is called lazy by family and friends. Why is it that if a person does not wish to spend the young years of his life sealed in an office building, he is labeled lazy, undirected, without goals and who do you think is going to take care of you, Mr. I'm-too-good-to-work-for-a-living-like-my-father-before-me-and-his-father-before-him? Just who do you think you are? Well. Maybe you know who you are and that was the thing that made it simple to walk away.
July 17, 2008
I read this directly after reading How to Make an American Quilt. I really really didn't like it and thought it was stupid. I still remember some line in the book, about how two ex-lovers were lying if they were still friends, or if that was true, they'd never really loved each other. I remember my bullshit detector going off about that line while I was reading it at age 15, and I still think about how it's wrong over a decade later.
October 15, 2008
This book was fantastically horrible. I think perhaps the author is not quite as deep as she thinks she is. There was all of this bizarre talk of "disappearing". One would assume that she meant metaphorically so, but no....she kept insisting that the character was physically disappearing. Lots of details about each and every character's lives and thoughts but nothing nothing nothing ever happened. Oh, you thought for SURE things were GOING to happen. No. Nothing happened. I would recommend this book to no one. Ever.
June 17, 2009
There was something about this book that didn't seem grounded--the plot felt beneath a layer of fog, the characters not terribly compelling. Only when Kiki de Montparnasse entered the narrative did I begin to become curious, and unfortunately, that ended as soon as it began.
June 25, 2013
What? I must be getting old. How else can I explain that I had so much trouble reading this book and making any sense out of it. It was just so preposterous and all the characters were such silly twits. What was it about really and should I have cared?
July 29, 2011
I suffered through this one. It was tedious to say the least. A lot of back and forth with outer lying characters and not much with the main character until the end... strange really.
July 23, 2017
Not interested. Did not finish.
September 3, 2013
This book had insight into women's lives and an interesting approach--it had trivia and love affairs and family history and travel, physical disappearances and even ghosts! But it was also distant and somewhat "flat" like the fizz gone out of a soft drink. I understand and I connect, but I don't care enough, and yet I think I will remember this book and not just as another book by an author I enjoyed before How to Make an American Quilt was wonderful) but because she shared the truth about women's lives and that truth is sometimes hard to tell.
October 7, 2011
This is a feminist version of Kafka's Metamorphosis. Instead of waking one morning to complete self-transformation into a large insect, this protagonist finds herself gradually disappearing as she nears forty. Many passages are profound and thought-provoking as the novel grapples with issues facing modern women today as they search for meaning, passion, and purpose. However, some tangents are a bit trite...and the novel ends on a decidedly corny note.
June 28, 2007
this book was a let down.. it started out with a really good premise but it started to drag.. and by the end it was already dead to me.
February 1, 2014
A sorry choice for me. Found nothing interesting or appealing about any of the characters & had to force myself to finish....hoping things might improve. Sad to say, they did not.
January 2, 2016
Not my cup of tea
Read
February 7, 2016I kept trying to like this book. At the end I just felt like I missed something.
July 12, 2018
Nothing drew me back to reading this book after I would have other reading such as for my bookclub. I finally had a lull and finished, well, not quite finished it. I think I had about 6 pages left and I just couldn't. However,
Otto writes vignettes of women characters that are so understandable - she doesn't retread tired descriptions. I particularly related to how she wrote about a woman (Gen, Kiki's mom), who had lost her husband.
".. she was, after all, a single woman and it would upset the balance of their dinner parties to have that extra woman around. which is often the way of it, couples pulling together as if their own marriages depended on it. Naturally, the single man is welcome because he is so helpless, would enjoy a home-cooked meal and there is always a stream of singel women with which to pair him, you see."
This was exactly my experience when I was widowed.
Her main character Kiki meets the ghost of Kiki de Montparnasse who she is named after. I thank Otto for introducing her because she was the muse for Man Ray, posing for several iconic photographs. I liked learning about that, but as I said, I just needed to admit defeat and skimmed the last few pages. I guess Kiki stopped disappearing and started traveling. Not enough threads pulled together at the end...
Otto writes vignettes of women characters that are so understandable - she doesn't retread tired descriptions. I particularly related to how she wrote about a woman (Gen, Kiki's mom), who had lost her husband.
".. she was, after all, a single woman and it would upset the balance of their dinner parties to have that extra woman around. which is often the way of it, couples pulling together as if their own marriages depended on it. Naturally, the single man is welcome because he is so helpless, would enjoy a home-cooked meal and there is always a stream of singel women with which to pair him, you see."
This was exactly my experience when I was widowed.
Her main character Kiki meets the ghost of Kiki de Montparnasse who she is named after. I thank Otto for introducing her because she was the muse for Man Ray, posing for several iconic photographs. I liked learning about that, but as I said, I just needed to admit defeat and skimmed the last few pages. I guess Kiki stopped disappearing and started traveling. Not enough threads pulled together at the end...
November 26, 2019
This was about the most mind numbing foray into an infantile Woman's persuit of purpose. If I ever knew a person like this character (Kiki), I think she'd be so self absorbed, and bored out of her mind, I would walk, no, RUN from them. What a waste of paper. (I gave it one star because 0 wasn't available). I couldn't finish it....and I can only say that about two or three books.
July 7, 2018
This book had some really great paragraphs and insights. It contains a very 90's sense of feminism, and is thus a little hard to connect with. Just coming off of How to Make an American Quilt, I feel that Otto struggles a bit with pacing.
August 30, 2017
As so many reviewers have said, this is NOT my cup of tea. I literally forced myself to finish. How could this book and How to Make an American Quilt be written by the same person?
June 25, 2019
It took me a bit to warm up to it. But I stuck with it and it was interesting. Glad I read it.
September 12, 2019
Could not get into the story. Felt it was disjointed.
February 11, 2025
It was a four star book until the last chapter with the tiresome "other" Kiki.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 18, 2022
Not nearly as good as her memoir.
January 5, 2009
Admittedly _Now You See Her_ isn't my kind of book, in fact I never would have picked it up if better audiobook options had been available at the time. Maybe one has to be in the middle of a midlife crisis in order to appreciate this book, but I'm not even sure that would help. Otto begins with an interesting premise - a woman approaching her 40th birthday begins literally to disappear - and accompanies it with acute observations about how women of a certain age vanish from the American public eye, BUT she ruins both by being so unbearably heavy-handed about it all. I also never came to care much about the characters, which is good because I probably would have wanted to hit them over the head repeatedly. There are some funny and insightful moments and the appearance of Kiki de Montparnasse, while utterly bizarre, is a breath of fresh air, but in general the plot lines are simplistic and predictable. For the first time in my life I was glad to discover halfway through that I was reading an abridged novel.
The one bright spot was the narrator, who has a pleasant natural voice and did an excellent job with each character. I would definitely listen to more of her audiobooks... as long as they're a different author and genre.
The one bright spot was the narrator, who has a pleasant natural voice and did an excellent job with each character. I would definitely listen to more of her audiobooks... as long as they're a different author and genre.
August 8, 2014
This is a fantastic book in both senses of the word. Now You See Her is a fantastically written, beautiful, funny, feminist, and philosophical novel. It is also based on the fantastic premise that a 40 year old woman, Kiki Shaw, finds herself disappearing, and Whitney Otto, in her inimitable way manages to create the pleasure of a page-turning novel at the same time that she plays out the metaphor of the disappearing woman and weaves in historical research, visual art, literary figures, and psychological insights. Now that I've finished the first reading, and I want to re-read to linger over all the beauty and insight. I've read all of Whitney Otto's novels now; with each one I am awed and inspired, and grateful that these books invite the reader back into their world, whether in remembering or re-reading.
August 15, 2008
NOW YOU SEE HER - Okay
Otto, Whitney - Novel
Kiki Shaw, approaching age 40, finds that she is becoming invisible. This process is the result of the American male's attitude toward single, aging women. Kiki's women friends are also being rendered invisible and weightless, both physically and psychologically. Each has her own way of coping. Kiki finds the process unnerving but is helpless to stop it. When she disappears completely, she goes to Paris, where she meets the ghost of her namesake, Kiki de Montparnasse. The ghost tells her that to become visible again, she must define herself rather than allowing outside forces to define her.
This was written by the author of "How to Make an American Quilt." It was interesting.
Otto, Whitney - Novel
Kiki Shaw, approaching age 40, finds that she is becoming invisible. This process is the result of the American male's attitude toward single, aging women. Kiki's women friends are also being rendered invisible and weightless, both physically and psychologically. Each has her own way of coping. Kiki finds the process unnerving but is helpless to stop it. When she disappears completely, she goes to Paris, where she meets the ghost of her namesake, Kiki de Montparnasse. The ghost tells her that to become visible again, she must define herself rather than allowing outside forces to define her.
This was written by the author of "How to Make an American Quilt." It was interesting.
January 29, 2014
I really started getting into this book when I identified "disappearing" literally as symbolic of how women become marginal and taken for granted. But then it got weird with ghosts traipsing through Paris, and didn't resolve the loose ends of all the characters that I found more interesting than the protagonist.
February 25, 2008
Couldn't bring myself to read this one for the longest time but once I did, I loved it. There is so much here about the importance of knowing yourself and finding yourself when you didn't even realize you were lost.
June 18, 2009
A woman's mid life crisis expressed though her becoming invisible, taking stock and finally finding out what she wants from life. Kind of more in the vein of the author's other books about people who did not grow up.
September 3, 2012
Very interesting, smart book. She plays with the idea of women's visibility/invisibility in the world. She does this by looking through the eyes of different types of women who are interrelated. It is a book that deserves thorough analysis.
January 29, 2014
I really enjoyed this book. The story itself is a little odd but it is a really fascinating read. I felt like I found a lot of little gems in this book. Of course, Whitney Otto is one of my favorite authors.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews