The Life Room

Eleanor Cahn is a professor of literature, the wife of a successful surgeon, and a devoted mother. But on a trip to Paris to present a paper on Anna Karenina, Eleanor re-connects with Stephen—a childhood friend, and more. The encounter ignites a discontent that she struggles alternately to suppress and to explore, and reawakens memories of her hidden erotic past: with alluring, elusive Stephen; with ethereal William, her high school boyfriend; with married, egotistical Adam, the painter who initiated her into the intimacies of the "life room," where the artist’s model sometimes becomes muse; and with loyal, steady Michael, her husband. On her return to New York, Eleanor and Stephen’s charged attraction takes on a life of its own and threatens to destroy everything she has.

Jill Bialosky has created a fresh, piercingly real heroine caught, like Tolstoy’s immortal Anna Karenina, between desire and responsibility.