Product Description

Lisa Diodetto's mother may be ready for her to get married but Lisa isn't.

At her sister's wedding she ducks when the bridal bouquet comes floating her way, and the only "eligible bachelor" in Lisa's life is her beloved gay cousin, Dodie.

Ditching her life as an underpaid, oversexed publishing drone in Manhattan, Lisa takes a lucrative spot at a more conservative company, and begins writing--on company time--a novel that pokes fun at corporate life.

Enter Lisa's main character: her new boss, Eben Strauss. A man of manners and caution, Strauss manages to bring out the best bad girl in Lisa. And before they know it, two very different people from two very different worlds are doing the one thing you should never do at the office: falling in love.

In her funny, familiar, heartbreaking new novel, the award-winning author of Blue Italian weaves a tale of family, work, sex, and love--and of all the things we try to leave behind but never really can. . . .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #976613 in Books
• Published on: 1999-12-28
• Released on: 1999-12-28
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.10" w x 5.24" l, .75 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

From Amazon.com
New York editorial jobs, especially entry-level ones, can be a drag. Lisa Diodetto, the twentysomething narrator of Rita Ciresi's Pink Slip, is well aware of this, having had her fill of dismal manuscripts and pitiful paychecks. So Lisa gives up on the supposed romance of publishing, ditching her job for a corporate position in a leafy suburb somewhere along the Hudson, where she edits things such as brochures and correspondences for Boorman Pharmaceuticals. The problem is that Lisa is a hot-blooded Italian American girl whose best friend is her gay cousin, Dodie. Even as she wants to shed their old ways--pot smoking and a shared habit of dating no-good men--she doesn't exactly try to integrate into corporate culture.

Lisa's skirts are on the too-short side, she uses office hours to work on a sex-filled novel about corporate life, and she starts dating someone in senior management. He, Eben Strauss, is Jewish and straight-laced--a foil to Lisa's naughty Catholic-girl persona. On a date to West Point, she notices that "Strauss wore a pair of tortoise shell prescription glasses that made me want to jump him. As he carefully inspected the foldout map of the grounds we picked up at the visitors' information center, I speculated whether he always took his glasses off before he moved in for the kill, or if he had even been so swept away he left them on through the entire act." Needless to say, Strauss wants to visit West Point's chapels while Lisa wants to view the cadets.

Lisa likes to think that she doesn't want to be the baby-hungry wife that her older, married sister has become. But the fact is that she craves a husband and a home and eventually a kid as much as her ordinary Italian relatives do. What makes Pink Slip appealing is the way in which Rita Ciresi shows how Lisa juggles her modern aspirations and Old World desires. It's a tricky tightrope to walk. --Katherine Alberg

From Publishers Weekly
A young woman's intraoffice, interfaith love affair collides with her devotion to her Italian-American family in another wise-cracking, romantic novel from Flannery O'Connor Award winner Ciresi. As in her Blue Italian, the protagonists in a problematical romance are an Italian woman and a Jewish man. Second-generation Sicilian Lisa Diodetto has just turned a mouthy 25 and shucked her job in New York and her rat-infested apartment in Brooklyn to take the improbable position of assistant manager in the editorial division of Boorman Pharmaceuticals, in Ossining, N.Y. There, she promptly falls in love with her available, rather uptight boss, Eben Strauss, who turns out to be the descendant of Holocaust survivors whose stories are in a collection of interviews Lisa has edited. Meanwhile, Lisa is working on her own work, Stop It Some More, a graphic corporate novel. The "excerpt" from the interviews offers a snippet of Ciresi's writing at its finest?thoughtful and lyrical. The novel, Lisa admits, is often "artificially witty," and, alas, Ciresi's believable but uneven romance too often merits this same description. The chain-of-command and divergent background problems of Lisa and Eben ring true and cliche-free. What drives the big wedge between them is a crisis involving Lisa's beloved gay cousin, Dodie, that reminds the reader how long ago the book's time frame?1985?really is. Author tour. (Jan.) FYI: Pink Slip won the 1997 Pirate's Alley Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Wit and humor are the keys to this lively novel."
--Mademoiselle

"Pink Slip mixes lust, corporate shenanigans and the dangers of writing tell-all books. . . . Ciresi's humor has an edgy Nora Ephron quality; her heroine is flawed enough to be endearing."
--St. Petersburg Times

"This is Jane Austen in New York at the end of the 20th century. . . . Ciresi mixes the tragic and the comic aspects of love in hilarious fashion."
--Tampa Tribune-Times

"Ms. Ciresi's wonderful prose and generous heart work together pitch perfectly here to render what we all hope for: a good love story."
--Bret Lott, author of Jewel