The Secret Life Of Eva Hathaway
A chick lit classic first published in 1985, The Secret Life of Eva Hathaway returns, hilarious and wicked as ever, for a new generation of fans.
So begins the saga of Eva Hathaway, the randy heroine who leaves a raft of heartbroken suitors when she elopes with entrepreneur Martin Weaver and moves from New York to Boston. Martin’s frequent road trips provide Eva with the calm necessary to pursue her stellar career as Fanny May Tingle, award winning composer of hymns.
Despite the lingering disapproval of her blueblood mother-in-law Ruth, who would love a grandchild, Eva’s marriage to Martin succeeds for four placid years. She assuages her homesickness for Manhattan with visits to Richard Weintraub, who designs artwork for her hymns, and Lionel Boyd, a high school confidante now a gay Broadway costume designer.
As Martin’s absences become prolonged and a void grows inside, Eva manages to stay on the straight and narrow by composing nonstop, working out, and parrying the ravings of her alcoholic mother Chuck. Eva’s formula seems to work until, one snowy afternoon, she goes to the Y for a course in self-defense. Instructor Paul Fox, a moonlighting tenor, at once identifies his new pupil as half insane, half genius, and 200% nymphomaniac. After several false starts that would make The Taming of the Shrew look like a christening, Fox and Eva connect…to put it mildly.
Conscience, lust, guilt, and that odd duck, joy, clash in a bawdy and hilarious comedy, a moving love story, and a social satire that continues to reverberate with today’s reader.
PRAISE
“A cannonade of manic moments in the sexual Armageddon of Eva Hathaway… a screaming meemie of a randy, comic first novel, a marathon of stand-up wisecracking that just might be a sleeper.”
Kirkus Reviews
“A dazzling new woman writer has written a hilariously sexy novel. Delightful, rollicking, erotic!”
UPI
Fantastic – a racy romp by a multi-talented author who revels in puns and luxuriates in sensuous sex scenes…has fun manipulating her colorful cast of characters and keeps the reader laughing from beginning to end.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A mordantly funny, wonderfully wry first novel. Weber portrays each character with enchanting humor and poignancy, and the resolution of Eva’s plight is memorable.”
Publishers Weekly
“An absolute delight…a first novel of humor and passion…Weber presents a well-wrought story replete with a marvelous main character and astonishing detail…downright riveting.”
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
“A witty and wicked novel that’s like a breath of fresh air…Eva plunges into the 1980s, poking fun at propriety, relationships, marriage, neurotic Jewish men, uptight WASPs, children, and just about everything else.”
Richmond Times Dispatch
“Weber’s fresh, brash voice and wacky humor are reminiscent of Mark Twain and Fran Liebowitz at their most curmudgeonly. This is a wingdinger of a first novel with a voice so audible it tickles the ear. Eva’s bed marathons…are laid out with a ribaldry that would make Tom Jones blush.”
New Woman
“The book of the season…zany, raunchy, sexy.”
John Barkham Reviews