Wellfleet Public Library

Author Talk:

Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

ALICE SADIE CELINE

It's opening night, but far from glamorous. Alice is performing in a local Bay Area production of the Winter's Tale, the complete opposite of what she had envisioned for her career back home in Los Angeles. To make matters worse, her best friend Sadie is not even coming. Pragmatic and serious Sadie and flighty, creative Alice have been best friends since high school, but now that they are through with college and living on opposite ends of California, Alice would at least expect her friend's support. Sadie, determined not to cancel her plans with her boyfriend, ends up enlisting the help of her mother Celine. Celine's landmark treatise on sex and identity made her notorious, but she's struggling to write her new book in a post-second-wave feminism world. When Sadie begs her to attend Alice's play, she relents, if only for an escape from writer's block. But in a turn of events perplexing even to herself, Celine becomes entranced by Alice's performance and realizes that her daughter's lanky, slightly annoying, best friend is now an irresistible young woman. Set over the course of decades, Alice and Celine's affair will test the limits of their love for Sadie and their own beliefs about power, agency, and feminism. Witty and relatable, sexy and surprising, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright's novel is a mesmerizing portrait of the inner lives of three very different women.

Sarah Blakley-Cartwright is the author of Red Riding Hood, a #1 New York Times bestseller published worldwide in thirty-eight editions and fifteen lanquages. She is the editor of Hauser & Wirth's The Artist's Library for Ursula magazine. She is publishing director of the Chicago Review

of Books, and associate editor of A Public Space.