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additional praise for Why Did I Ever

“Mary Robison, almost as an afterthought, has created a novel that speaks volumes about life in Los Angeles: its stopping and starting, its rushing and emoting, its whimsy and its suspicious, subversive humor.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“The author, who is known as a minimalist, here creates a narrative out of fragmented paragraphs, and the book works best when she strips Money’s most explicit fears away. A simple sentence fragment—‘Canoe, moon, ukelele’—seems a close to perfect expression of lost beauty.”

—The New Yorker

“Robison’s characters are vivid, colorful, and likable, and their story is absorbing. Her humorous presentation does not cheapen the tragic content of her novel but realistically portrays one method of survival. Highly recommended for all public and academic fiction collections.”

—Library Journal

“Robison’s incandescent soliloquy on the absurdity of existence hones fiction to a new and exhilarating measure of sharpness.”

—donna seaman, Booklist

“[A] tour de force of minimalist yet mind-expanding prose . . . [Robison] makes you think—hard—about life’s unavoidable travails, while making it impossible for you to suppress a smile.”

—lisa shea, Elle

“What makes Money memorable, and Mary Robison essential, is that her fundamental bearings are the right ones. Love and compassion are her nature, and they suffuse the page whenever she is talking about her children, even the exasperating daughter.”

—richard dyer, The Boston Globe

“Why Did I Ever is a rarity: an experimental novel that’s both engaging and wholly successful.”

—Time Out New York

“Robison . . . possesses a precocious alertness to the incongruities of life . . . At the center is a disciplined and clear-headed novel full of humor and an occasional glimmer of optimism.”

—rob stout, The Charlotte Observer

“I wish to live in [Money’s] mind for a while because its perilously funny pratfalls make me want to laugh so badly that I cannot laugh at all.”

—molly mcquade, Newsday

“It is a rare novel that can manage to convey the coexistence of tragedy and pleasure so immediately without lessening the reader’s enjoyment of either.”

—The New Leader

“Mary Robison has done for the Hollywood culture of our time what Joan Didion did thirty years ago. Spare and ruthless, precisely chiseled, Why Did I Ever is the Play It As It Lays of the twenty-first century.”

—madison smartt bell, author of All Souls’ Rising

“Mary Robison’s stunned and plunging characters are the truth. This is pure, grim poetry.”

—barry hannah, author of High Lonesome

“Deeply strange, hilarious, heartbreaking, and just stupidly great . . . Robison is something approaching brilliant, and Why Did I Ever is hard-bound proof.”

—darcy cosper, Hartford Courant