Personal Velocity [Hardcover]

Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity offers a wry take on work, sex and relationships in the lives of seven people in search of what it means to be a 21st-century woman. Sharp and intimate, these stories are a capsule wardrobe of contemporary American femininity, from off-the-peg urban identities pre-packaged by a designer label to battered, homeless survivors whose lives are held together only by their own emotional stamina. Cookery book editor Greta dumps her husband for fame and pointy alligator flats, artist Louisa squeezes out her lovers faster than tubes of paint and pregnant Paula picks up a young hitchhiker on a rainy night.

Miller brings a clear and unsentimental eye to her characters, and pleasing brevity of style and compressed drama to her prose. Flawed and admirable, terrified and fearless, cavalier and overanxious by turns--the vagaries of personality are encompassed in this poised debut. Many a reader may catch a fleeting glimpse of her own contradictory reflections in Miller's intense snapshots of modern women. --Rachel Holmes

'This remarkable writer reveals what is under our noses. And isn't that the gift of a true artist?' Frank McCourt author of Angela's Ashes

'Miller is a brilliantly observant writer... In her hands, every emotion and state of mind are fully imagined and acutely realised.'

'Miller really knows momentum. Each story launches a fully rounded character into play like a pinball sprung into action.'

'Miller writes with welcome sensitivity around women and children. And when she confronts vulnerability she is more compelling still.'

'Miller has the ability to instantly engage readers in the world she's creating.'

Rebecca Miller's collection of short stories covers many themes: sexuality, compromise, fate, motherhood, infidelity, being single, wanting to be single, age, class, desperation and an overriding will to survive. Rebecca Miller is Arthur Miller's daughter and Daniel Day Lewis' wife.

Rebecca Miller's powerful debut explores the multi-faceted lives of women in seven arresting portraits. Modern and diverse, these women of different classes and ages struggle with sexuality, fate, motherhood, infidelity, desperation and an overriding will to surivive.

We meet Greta, a cookbook editor chosen by the hottest writer of his generation to edit his new novel. When the book becomes a bestseller Greta is propelled out of her marriage by her own ambition and success. And Nancy, a psycologically troubled nine-year-old growing up within New York high society. Nancy likes to see how long she can be in a room without her father noticing her; her record to date is one hour, seventeen minutes and thirty-four seconds... There's Delia, an abused wife who goes into hiding with her chidlren, and Louisa, a painter who moves rapidly from one lover to the next, acting out a self-perpetuating drama over which she has no control.

Rebecca Miller is a stunning new voice in American fiction. In these edgy, illuminating stories, her prose is crisp, her voices true, and her understanding of women's lives astounding.

Rebecca Miller is a filmmaker. Her feature film, Angela, won the Filmmakers Trophy and the Cinematography Award at the Sundance Film Festival and the IFT Gotham Prize. Personal Velocity is her first book.

Greta Herskovitz looked down at her husband’s shoes one morning and saw with shocking clarity that she was going to leave him. The shoes were earnest, inexpensive brown wing tips. Greta was wearing a pair of pointy alligator flats. Lee was twenty-eight, the same age as Greta. He was six feet tall, had blond hair, powerful shoulders and a slender waist. His cheeks were peppered with pockmarks, but they looked good on him. Since he’d left graduate school, Lee had worked as a fact checker for The New Yorker and was whittling away at an eleven-hundred-page dissertation about two firsthand accounts of nineteenth century Arctic expeditions and how they reflected Victorian society. The cannibalism in particular. Lee was a kind, quiet man. If he ever fell out of love with Greta, she knew he would go into therapy and fix it. But she hadn’t bargained on her own success.

One day about a year prior to the moment with the shoes, Greta was walking down the hall of the shabby, venerable publishing firm Warren and Howe in a pair of cheap pumps, carrying an untidy pile of seven file folders, each containing a different recipe for rice pudding. She was currently editing a book by Tammy Lee Febler entitled Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Ways to Cook Rice. Aaron Gelb, the legendary senior editor at Warren and Howe, a wise, sad man with enormous pockets under his brown eyes and a slow, pessimistic, humorous pattern of speech, called out to her from his office.

“Ms Herskovitz,” he said, “ would you come in please?”

Greta turned, alarmed. She was wearing a fitted brown suit with a skirt that ended several inches above the knees, and she wondered if maybe she was pushing it. As she entered, Mr Gelb sat down at his desk and put his head in his hands, his customary posture when in thought. Greta sat down opposite him. Her nylons rubbed together as she crossed her legs. Worried that her skirt looked obscene, she gave it a little tug. Mr Gelb slipped his glasses to the top of his head, rubbing his eyes for a very long time and sighing. Then he looked out the window.

“Thavi Matola wants to have lunch with you,” he said. Thavi Matola was the hottest writer of his generation. He was thirty-three. Greta’s publishing house wanted him badly. They were calling his agent, trying to get to him through his friends. His first novel, Blue Mountain, was a lovely story about Bounmy, a Laotian male prostitute, and an Alabama gas-station attendant named Rory. It had won the PEN Faulkner Prize, sold half a million copies.

“With me?”Greta said.

“He called me up and said he heard we had an excellent editor here. And it was you.” Greta had never edited anything but cookbooks. “Do you have any idea why he might have said that?"

“Maybe he likes to cook,” said Greta. Mr Gelb smiled faintly.
“If the lunch goes well, he’ll come to warren and Howe. If not, he’ll go peddle his wounded psyche someplace else.”
“Wow,” said Greta. “This is really strange.”
“One o’clock on Thursday at the Senate,” Gelb said, opening a drawer and taking out a large roll of antacid tablets. “Wear pants.” Greta got up. When she was at the door, Gelb said, “Wear what you want. What do I know.” She shut the door. Poor Mr Gelb. She went straight out to the most expensive shoe store she had ever heard of and put the alligator flats on her credit card. She couldn’t even begin to afford them, but she needed to feel worthy, she needed to feel like a pro.
On the day of the meeting she wore a red suit with a fairly short skirt-just above the knees. It was a cool, clear spring day. She was twenty minutes early, so she walked over to the Museum of Modern Art and wandered around the cluttered gift shop with the fixed stare of a sleepwalker, little charges of anxiety going off in her belly, till three minutes to one. Then she rushed over to the restaurant, sat down at the corner table that had been reserved by Mr Gelb’s secretary, and took out her notebook so she’s look busy. Inside was a shopping list: bananas, clementines, toilet paper, rice, batteries, tampons. She looked up and Thavi Matola was standing there.
“Greta Herskovitz?” he said.
“Yes-oh, hi!” Greta stood up, adjusting her hair band. She felt off-kilter. She should have been watching him. Thavi sat down. He was slender, androgynous-looking, with smooth brown skin and short curly hair. His mother was Loatian, Greta remembered. Father, Italian-American soldier, dead. Refugees. Hard life. Three sisters, two left behind in Laos because of that government.
“I really loved your first book,” she said.
“It’s a piece of shit,” said Thavi in a slight accent, lighting a cigarette.
“I think that’s pretty common,” said Greta.
“Second thoughts?”
“Self hatred.” A minor convulsion of amusement forced the smoke out of Matola’s nose; he fixed his gaze on Greta like a child surprised to hear a stranger call him by his nick name. Greta felt her muscles relax. “The pasta’s good here,” she said, then ordered steak frites. Thavi convulsed again, air hissing from his nostrils, lips clamped shut. They started a bottle of wine. Greta didn’t usually drink at lunch but she culd tell he wanted to so she went with it, trying hard not to let her mind go slack.
”What’s the new book about?” she asked. “If you don’t mind talking about it.”
“Laos,” he said. “The trip over. I was on my own.”
“That must have been frightening,” said Greta. “How old were you?”
“Thirteen,” he said.
“Have you written much yet?”
“ About a hundred pages. Aren’t I the one supposed to be asking the questions?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“What’s your story?” he asked.