Amy Falls Down: A Novel

by Jincy Willett

Overview

Amy Gallup is an aging novelist and writing instructor living in Escondido, California, with her dog, Alphonse. Since recent unsettling events, she has made some progress. While she still has writer's block, she doesn't suffer from it. She's still a hermit, but she has allowed some of her class members into her life. She is no longer numb, angry, and sardonic: she is merely numb and bemused, which is as close to happy as she plans to get. Amy is calm.

So, when on New Year's morning she shuffles out to her backyard garden to plant a Norfolk pine, she is wholly unprepared for what happens next.

Amy falls down.

A simple accident, as a result of which something happens, and then something else, and then a number of different things, all as unpredictable as an eight-ball break. At first the changes are small, but as these small events carom off one another, Amy's life changes in ways that range from ridiculous to frightening to profound.

This most reluctant of adventurers is dragged and propelled by train, plane, and automobile through an outlandish series of antic media events on her way to becoming--to her horror--a kind of celebrity. And along the way, as the numbness begins to wear off, she comes up against something she has avoided all her life: her future, that "sleeping monster, not to be poked."

Jincy Willett's Amy Falls Down explores, through the experience of one character, the role that accident plays in all our lives. "You turn a corner and beasts break into arias, gunfire erupts, waking a hundred families, starting a hundred different conversations. You crack your head open and three thousand miles away a stranger with Asperger's jump-starts your career."

We are all like Amy. We are all wholly unprepared for what happens next.

Also, there's a basset hound.
An NPR Best Book of 2013

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250028280
Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Publication date:	07/09/2013
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	95,638
File size:	508 KB

About the Author

JINCY WILLETT is the author of Jenny and the Jaws of Life, Winner of the National Book Award, and The Writing Class, which have been translated and sold internationally. Her stories have been published in Cosmopolitan, McSweeney's Quarterly, and other magazines. She frequently reviews for The New York Times Book Review. Willett spends her days parsing the sentences of total strangers and her nights teaching and writing—sometimes, late at night, in the dark, she laughs inappropriately.
JINCY WILLETT is the author of Jenny and the Jaws of Life, Winner of the National Book Award, and The Writing Class, which have been translated and sold internationally. Her stories have been published in Cosmopolitan, McSweeney's Quarterly and other magazines. She frequently reviews for The New York Times Book Review.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE
 
Accident
 
 
Because the Norfolk pine was heavy, and also because she was wearing house slippers, having not yet dressed for the day, Amy took her time getting to the raised garden. Her house slippers were fuzzy, oversized, and floppy, and if she moved too fast, she would walk right out of them.
She was not yet dressed for the day because she had no reason to dress until much later, at which time she’d have to dress uncomfortably, and she was in no hurry to do that. At three o’clock a reporter from The San Diego Union-Tribune was coming to interview Amy as part of some bogus series about local writers. Although she’d specified no current events and especially no photographs, she didn’t trust a reporter who sounded on the phone as though she were eight years old and couldn’t think of anything funnier than not wanting your face on public display. Imagine, her laughter implied, denying the world the chance to gaze upon you. So Amy dreaded the interview but was not actively doing so, or thinking about it at all, as she shuffled toward the raised garden with the Norfolk pine.
She shuffled past her mimosa tree, where three goldfinches clung to a thistle-seed feeder, and past her green plastic pseudo-Adirondack chairs, covered with two seasons’ worth of dirt, seeds, and leaves, which she really must hose off one of these days. She shuffled closer to the raised garden, as the screen door banged behind her and Alphonse jingled past and up ahead of her, his great basset nose zeroing in on the very spot where she planned to dig, as though her trail had magically preceded her. James Thurber said that his bloodhound always seemed more interested in where he’d been than where he was; Alphonse had an uncanny fascination with where she planned to be, and a genius for thwarting her: ordinarily a sedate plodder, he could materialize in a chair just as she was about to sit down; if she suddenly felt peckish at two in the morning, he’d be waiting in front of the refrigerator, his eyes glowing red in the dark kitchen. Now he sniffed round and round the digging spot. “No!” she shouted. “Desist, you miscreant!” Alphonse feigned deafness, as though so anxious to relieve himself that he could think of nothing else, which was mendacious, as he usually slept in until midmorning and even then typically put off his bathroom break until noon. He was just messing with her head.
So she shuffled a little faster, intent on reaching her goal before Alphonse fully committed himself to his, and when she came to the raised garden, her eyes fixed on Alphonse, and lifted her right foot to step onto the low brick wall, she misjudged its elevation by perhaps a quarter inch, not enough to stub her toes and trip, just enough to throw her very slightly off-balance, the sole of her foot catching and scraping on the rough brick rather than coming straight down to meet it, and still she rose, her attention now divided between Alphonse and the heavy potted pine, her center of gravity higher than usual as she clutched it to her midriff, and then the slipper on her left foot did flop off and she did stub her left toes, or rather skinned the tops of them on the harsh edge of the brick, which really shouldn’t have been catastrophic, but was, because now she was thinking about three different things, Alphonse, her toes, and the Norfolk pine, so that somehow her balance shifted forward, and certain physical forces, inertia and momentum, began to announce themselves, clearing their throats politely. All was not lost at this point, they said, but a fall was possible, and Amy, over-thinking as usual, realizing that in such a fall the pine might suffer irreparably, focused on cradling it in such a way that it would not suffer, as though she were sixteen years old and lithe and presented with a smorgasbord of landing-position selections, none of which would injure her in the slightest, whereas what she should have done was jettison the damn plant and save herself, but no, and then she had actually lost balance and was pitching forward, her legs and feet heroically striving to catch up with her upper body, so that, still falling, she gathered speed, and, seeing that all was lost, she began to twist around in order to land on her back, and then her bare left heel slammed down on a sprinkler head and she heard her ankle crunch, but felt nothing because within the time it would have taken for the pain message to arrive in her brain, she had knocked herself out on the birdbath.


 
Copyright © 2013 by Jincy Willett

Editorial Reviews

Willett’s hilarious follow-up to The Writing Class pulls no punches when it comes to current literary trends. Amy Gallup was once heralded as a fresh voice in fiction, but with her novels now long out of print, she’s content with a quiet, anonymous life of leading workshops, keeping lists of great-sounding titles for stories she’ll never write, and maintaining her sporadically updated blog. One afternoon, however, while working in her garden, Amy trips and cold-cocks herself on a birdbath. Still reeling from the head injury hours later, she gives a loopy interview to a reporter working on a series of local author profiles. The result goes viral, and suddenly Amy is a hot commodity on the literary pundit trail. She couldn’t care less about being relevant or famous, which lends a refreshingly brutal honesty to her commentary on the radio, television, and lecture circuit. But her newfound notoriety also pushes Amy out of her comfort zone, forcing her to confront years of neuroses and an unexamined postwriting life. Willett uses her charmingly filterless heroine as a mouthpiece to slam a parade of thinly veiled literati and media personalities with riotous accuracy, but she balances the snark with moments of poignancy. (July)

Publishers Weekly

I loved this novel—it's totally brilliant—witty and mordant....I thought Willett couldn't top Winner of the National Book Award, but I was wrong—this one definitely does.” —Nancy Pearl

“Willett uses her charmingly filterless heroine as a mouthpiece to slam a parade of thinly veiled literati and media personalities with riotous accuracy, but she balances the snark with moments of poignancy.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The books of Jincy Willett are a delicious secret—witty, clever, ironic, funny. Her new novel, Amy Falls Down, pokes fun at our world of instant celebrity and buzz.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Jincy Willett is hilarious, witty, and compelling....Put Amy Falls Down on the top of your list.” —The Providence Journal

From the Publisher

Willett’s previous book, The Writing Class, introduced readers to the wonderfully acerbic author/creative writing teacher Amy Gallup. That novel was a regular whodunit, but this sequel is not in the mystery genre at all. Rather, it is a lovingly gentle but thorough skewering of the current literary world, the media surrounding it, and the “authors-as-brands” who often populate it. The novel opens with Amy falling and hitting her head on a birdbath. Long afraid of doctors and hospitals, she doesn’t immediately seek treatment but instead gives an interview to a local newspaper journalist—a young woman who’s featuring Amy in a “whatever happened to” article. (Amy’s debut novel at 22 was a tremendous success, but nothing in the resulting 40 years quite lived up to the potential promised by it.) Amy’s incoherent ramblings set off a chain of events featuring her as a straight talker surrounded by pretentiousness.

Verdict Funny and whip-smart about the modern book world, Willett’s novel is also profound and touching on relationships, aging, and self-reflection. Absolutely recommended, whether or not you read The Writing Class, and especially if you’re a voracious reader or a writer, a publisher, a critic, or a book blogger. [See Prepub Alert, 1/25/13.]—Amy Watts, Univ. of Georgia Lib., Athens
(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Library Journal

Amy Gallup, 60, hasn't published a book in 20 years, and she's settled into a quiet life with her beloved basset hound, Alphonse. None too excited about a newspaper interview she's agreed to give, she trips, knocking herself out on the birdbath just hours before she's scheduled to play the role of has-been local writer. Oddly, she regains consciousness to see the reporter's car pulling out of her driveway. In the emergency room later, she has the distinct pleasure of reading her own interview--an interview she evidently gave without the assistance of a conscious, rational mind. Amy's cryptic, concussion-addled interview rejuvenates her career. Suddenly, her agent--chain-smoking, aggressive but kindly Maxine--is calling again, arranging appearances and pushing for new material. Her former writing students are back, too. After all, their crazed, knife-wielding former classmate (from Willett's The Writing Class, 2008) is now safely behind bars. The collection of friends and opponents surrounding Amy are flat characters bedazzled with quirks, but that doesn't quite make them quirky. Grudgingly, Amy goes on tour, battling wits with shrill, book-phobic radio hosts, twitter-bewitched moderators, new authors drunk on blogs and old authors drunk on scotch. Along the way, she confronts the demons of her past, including her buried grief for her late, gay husband, as well as her ambivalence about success. The skewering of the business of selling books--despite some hilarious scenes and Amy's dry humor--gets repetitive as Amy tirelessly defends real writing and debunks virtual book launches. Amy is endearing, yet it is difficult to remain curious about a heroine whose only interest is writing. Willett's skill in crafting zany scenes and Amy's acerbic wit are not enough to keep this novel afloat.

Kirkus Reviews