Product Description

The women in Willy Muller’s life are trouble. His mother insists he eat tofu. His dopey girlfriend, Penny, wants him to overcome his personal space issues – while Karen, his other, even dopier, girlfriend, just wants more sex. Meanwhile, his oldest daughter, Sophie, wants him to finance her husband’s drug habit. But it’s his youngest daughter, Sadie, who’s giving him the biggest headache. Just before committing suicide three months ago, she sent Willy her diaries. Poring over the record of her empty life, he feels pangs of something unexpected . . . remorse. But isn’t it a bit late for such sentimental guff? Set in London, Hollywood and Mexico, Everything You Know is a supremely witty take on love, death and the age-old battle of the sexes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19493 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

About the Author
Zoë Heller is the author of three novels, Everything You Know, Notes on a Scandal, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003 and The Believers. She lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

She Knows a Lot
For those like me who religiously read Zoe Heller's Saturday column in the Daily Telegraph, they may long since have come to the conclusion that she would make the perfect girlfriend: intelligent, funny, erudite and attractive with vaguely raunchy undercurrents. Her serious writing doesn't disappoint either and only adds to her considerable appeal. Too bad she's now firmly tucked away in New York: definitely our loss.

The story of EverythingYou Know carries some of the macabre fascination of a car crash and one which assaults the reader on two fronts: the (almost) hopeless doom of Willy Muller, its main protagonist, combined with the unbearable tragedy of his younger daughter's suicide and his irreparable estrangement from her elder sister. These themes are cleverly slanted so that on the one hand the suicide has already taken place before the book begins, and on the other his first daughter comes across as a truly hideous individual. I was only trying to scrape up some sympathy for her because, thinking of myself as being a compassionate person, I knew I should – dysfunctional childhoods, and all that.

Heller's grasp of all her characters is as sure-footed as a deceptively delicate mountain goat and if at times you want her to maybe just turn the volume down a little bit, she clearly relishes her cast with a tangible mirth. But it's her acute observation of everyday detail that wins the day, and I can only recall Paul Theroux doing it as well as she does (see Hotel Honolulu, for example); whether it's the way certain women walk or speak, or the exact manner in which another takes her knickers off, Heller's power of description is superlative and often unforgettable.

But maybe none of this would be over-remarkable in itself were it not for this wonderful writer's underlying compassion and clear sensitivity. One always feels that however ghastly her characters' behaviour, the ghastliness is informed and mitigated by a very human, and often very raw, vulnerability. It seems that Zoe Heller knows deep inside about these things. Her next book is due shortly. We'll know more about her then, and I for one can't wait for that. Meanwhile I'm already scheming about how she's going to become my girlfriend in another life . . .

A book you should read
This is an engaging, thoroughly entertaining book. Ms. Heller manages to inhabit the soul of a middle-aged man and does so so convincingly, you almost forget that it is not a middle-aged man writing. The story is touching and infuriating, moving and maddening. Ms. Heller reinvigorates a tiring genre: the crusty curmudgeon looking back with anger and acid. This is a book you should read.

‘Only when you die do you run out of chances to be good’
Spurred by his increasingly apparent mortality and the recent suicide of his estranged daughter, Willy Muller makes his way gradually from a self-imposed and empty exile in America to an attempt to reconcile himself with what’s left of his family in Britain. Willy, who is both narrator and protagonist, is by his own admission a good bad writer when ghosting celebrity biographies. Happily for the reader Heller has him up his game when it comes to narrating the details of his own life. The prose is inventive and lively at the beginning of the book, adeptly painting a portrait of a self-centred man barely aware of those around him whose only observations of the world are cynical and material. By the end of the book the prose has shed much of its bravado and become calmer and more reflective, in keeping with Willy’s shifting sensibilities. The transition from one to the other is done with skill, the tone shifting gradually whilst retaining enough of the original Willy to make it believable. Despite the seriousness of the book’s focus, there are moments of high comedy and some delightful observations on the nature of sex and relationships, amongst other things. Indeed, the book is a good deal more complex than can even be hinted at in so short a review. I would recommend anyone to read it.