Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York
by Gail Parent
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gail ParentEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-01-28
ISBN: 1585674710
Number of pages: 223
Publisher: Overlook TP
Book Reviews of Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York
Book Review: Funny and sad...but mostly very funny!
Summary: 5 Stars
A couple of reviewers have given this book a bad review. They both sound like idiots. One of them doesn't even seem to have read the book; this person said that Sheila was a PROSTITUTE! Well, let me clear THAT one up right now. Sheila is NOT a prostitute. She's a Jewish woman with stereotypical Jewish parents and she has had it drummed into her that the most important thing in life for a woman is to be married.
Sheila lives in New York and has tried to live the breezy, carefree New York girl life she's always seen depicted in Doris Day movies. But Doris Day never had to deal with living in a cramped apartment with various wacko roommates; Doris never had a low-paying boring job and a meddling, nagging mother. And Doris always had a lot of handsome eligible men vying for her hand in marriage. Poor Sheila comes to realize that life as a single, overweight, not particularly pretty woman in New York City is a kind of hell on earth, especially if you're desperate to get married...to ANYBODY. She has a long relationship with a boring unattractive man she doesn't even like but she's willing to settle for him, if he'd only marry her. She proposes to a gay friend of hers, saying that if they were married she'd have his kids and he could do whatever he wanted to do with men. Sheila is really quite sad; for her, being with someone is better than being with no one, and she feels inadequate because she's not married. She feels like a failure because she's not married and is so fed up with trying to get a guy to marry her that she decides to commit suicide. Obviously Sheila's incredibly screwed up. She believes that her obsession with marriage stems from being conditioned from earliest childhood that the most important thing a Jewish girl must achieve in her life is marriage. Maybe so. But Sheila doesn't do anything to make herself see things in a different light; she makes a few half-hearted attempts at therapy but her efforts go nowhere. The book is her suicide note.
All of this probably seems very depressing and it is in places. But Sheila's self-deprecating viewpoint, her observations about the people she comes in contact with and her descriptions of the frequently horrid situations that befall her are almost always funny as hell. Which is why it's kind of a shock that in some places in the book the reader might feel like crying. An example of this is Sheila's delayed reaction to the ordeal of having to attend her sister's wedding. You want to cry for Sheila.
This book was released in the seventies, so it may seem dated to some people. I read this book in the seventies, but it still makes me smile and feel sad for Sheila Levine. It's a great book!
Summary of Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York
Three decades after its original bestselling publication, Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York is still completely on target as the most achingly funny book-length suicide note ever written by an agonizingly single 30-year-old trying unsuccessfully to straddle two worlds: the one she's been programmed for from birth?marriage first, life later?and the illusive swinging singles scene of liberated New York City.Meet Sheila Levine, she?s smart and funny, and her mother tells her she?s beautiful. . . . But her skirt?s always a bit wrinkled, she?s trying to lose 15?make that 25?pounds, she just turned 30 . . . and she?s still single. She tries to date and mate, she really does, but disappointment turns to desperation, and after a flash of insight, Sheila calmly decides to kill herself. So she starts to get her affairs in order and writes a suicide note to her loving parents to explain it all.
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