I Regret Everything
A Love Story
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Angry Buddhist: “An intoxicating and ultimately moving modern romance . . . A story that’s all the sweeter for its shadows” (Los Angeles Review of Books).
I Regret Everything confronts the oceanic uncertainty of what it means to be alive, and in love. Jeremy Best, a Manhattan-based trusts and estates lawyer, leads a second life as published poet Jinx Bell. To his boss’s daughter, Spaulding Simonson, at thirty-three years old, Jeremy is already halfway to dead. When Spaulding, an aspiring nineteen-year-old writer, discovers Mr. Best’s alter poetic ego, the two become bound by a devotion to poetry, and an awareness that time in this world is limited. Their budding relationship strikes at the universality of love and loss, as Jeremy and Spaulding confront their vulnerabilities, revealing themselves to one another and the world for the very first time.
A skilled satirist with a talent for biting humor, Seth Greenland creates fully realized characters that quickly reveal themselves as complex renderings of the human condition—at its very best, and utter worst. I Regret Everything explores happiness and heartache with a healthy dose of skepticism, and an understanding that the reality of love encompasses life, death, iambic pentameter, regret, trusts, and estates.
“Affecting and funny.” —The New York Times
“Edgy and sweet, witty and wise, I Regret Everything is rollicking good fun. It’s also, in the end, a deeply moving love story between two unforgettable characters discovering what it means to truly be alive.” —Maria Semple, New York Times–bestselling author of Where’d You Go Bernadette
“A poignant story of dreams and the way they can crash into the reality of the dreamers.” —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jeremy Best, a lawyer by day, also moonlights as a poet under the name Jinx Bell, publishing occasionally (if implausibly) in The Paris Review. Spaulding, a 19-year-old woman who's a fan of Bell's poems, figures out that the writer behind them is Jeremy, who happens to be working in her father's Manhattan law firm. The restless and unpredictable Spaulding playfully pursues Jeremy. In alternating chapters, Jeremy and Spaulding reveal their respective perspectives on the unfolding events, so that readers learn of their private struggles, including a particularly tragic shock for Jeremy he initially tries to keep secret. Greenland (The Angry Buddhist), a former writer for the TV show Big Love, has a clear and snappy handle on the New York City worlds of M.F.A.s, M.F.A. dropouts, and poetry workshops, as well as their counterpoint in the Sutton Place penthouses of Jeremy's wealthy clients. This much is convincing and entertaining early on, though one does question the whole premise, which has been done so many times before: why must the 30-something lawyer find vibrancy and renewal in a teenage girl? As the second half of the novel slides into chaos and Jeremy and Spaulding consummate their relationship, investment in either character becomes tough to maintain. While Greenland is attempting an earnest, serious meditation on love or art or mortality, the book often feels like a silly romantic comedy that can't escape its genre.
