The Miss America Family

The touching and thoughtful novel from the bestselling author of Girl Talk

Baggott explores contemporary "civilized" behavior and the imperfections of a "perfect American family" with wit and grace

Julianna Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart

Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of EMPIRE FALLS

An accomplished and charmingly messy tale of love and redemption

Julianna Baggott has published dozens of short stories and poems and is the author of the prize winning poetry collection, This Country of Mothers and the bestselling novel Girl Talk. She teaches at Florida State University's Creative Writing Program. She lives in Florida with her husband, writer David G.W. Scott, and their three young children. Visit her website at www.juliannabaggott.com

The best day of Pixie's life was the day she won the Miss New Jersey beauty pageant. Her dreams stretched in front of her: a Miss America could go anywhere, be anyone. Fame and fortune were at her fingertips - until she fell pregnant. Now, the mother of a teenager, on her second marriage, she is beset by memories of her glittering career. 
 
Ezra, her sixteen-year-old son, notices none of this. It's the start of the long summer holiday and his main preoccupation is the girl next door and his quest to lose his virginity. Engaging and honest, he tells his own story of what it means to be the child of a woman whose American dream went nowhere. 
 
Soulful and mordantly funny in the vein of American Beauty, Pixie and Ezra unfold a story of the American family that is at once touching and fiercely honest.

Julianna Baggott

Steve Almond

Praise for Which Brings me to You: 
'From its opening sentence this "novel in confessions" draws you into its intimacy, murmuring huskily in your ear "you know you would have done the same"... So wonderfully written that one is completely seduced... Their exchanges shimmer with a highly intelligent sexual charge... So smart, so tender, so well wrought. It has echoes of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife in its unflinching yet powerfully touching account of the intensities of love and sex. John writes to Jane, "tell me something filthy and lovely and true", and this book, wonderfully, is all those things.'

Two lonely, lived-in, thirty-somethings. One boring wedding. One heated encounter in a quiet cloakroom. 
 
It's not exactly the recipe for love. And John and Jane's time in a cloakroom clearly isn't the beginning of anything real; even they know that. When they manage to pull back, literally, it occurs to them that they might start this whole thing over, properly. They might try getting to know one another first. But they live on opposite sides of the country. So they agree to write. 
 
And they do. What follows is a series of traded and shared confessions: of their messy sexual and emotional histories, their first shy, callow relationships, their past errors and their big loves, their flaws and their passions. Each story of a love affair - confessed with striking honesty - reveals the ways in which both Jane and John have grown and grown up, changed and not changed, over the years; the people they hurt, the ones still bruised, the ones that bruised them. Where all of this confession will take them is the burning question behind every letter - one that can only be answered when they meet again, finally, in the flesh... 
 
This is a remarkable novel - indeed a tour-de-force - in its extraordinary well-observed insights into the way we live now, of mating and dating in a post-feminist time, of the negotiations between the sexes in the challenging world of equal but different. Written by a man and a woman, it is not only remarkable, it is unique.

Which Brings Me To You

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Julianna Baggott

Praise for Which Brings Me To You

Praise for Which Brings me to You:
'From its opening sentence this "novel in confessions" draws you into its intimacy, murmuring huskily in your ear "you know you would have done the same"... So w ...

Books by Julianna Baggott

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Praise for Which Brings Me To You

Praise for Which Brings me to You: 'From its opening sentence this "novel in confessions" draws you into its intimacy, murmuring huskily in your ear "you know you would have done the same"... So w ...

Books by Julianna Baggott

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Praise for Which Brings me to You:
'From its opening sentence this "novel in confessions" draws you into its intimacy, murmuring huskily in your ear "you know you would have done the same"... So w ...