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A wry yet tenderhearted look at how one man's public fall from grace leads him back to his family, and back to the man he used to be.
It's a story that Ted Grayson has reported time and time again in his job as a network TV anchor: the public downfall of those at the top. He just never imagined that it would happen to him. After his profanity-laced tirade is caught on camera, his reputation and career are destroyed, leaving him without a script for the first time in years.
While American viewers may have loved and trusted Ted for decades, his family certainly didn't: His years of constant travel and his big-screen persona have frayed all of his important relationships. At the time of his meltdown, Ted is estranged from his wife, Claire, and his adult daughter, Franny, a writer for a popular website. Franny views her father's disgrace with curiosity and perhaps a bit of smug satisfaction, but when her boss suggests that she confront Ted in an interview, she has to decide whether to use his loss as her career gain. And for Ted, this may be a chance to take a hard look at what got him to this place, and to try to find his way back before it's too late.
Talk to Me is a sharply observed, darkly funny, and ultimately warm story about a man who wakes up too late to the mess he's made of his life... and about our capacity for forgiveness and empathy.
"Starred Review. A powerful and moving rendition of a story we've been waiting to hear: what it's like to be the bad guy in this ripped-from-the-headlines situation." - Kirkus
"Kenney is supremely gifted at creating flawed, vivid characters and capturing the wonder, ennui, and heartbreak of marriage and parenthood, and the seemingly small moments that make life precious." - Publishers Weekly
"Kenney's timely satire succeeds with significant nuance... Most winning, though, are Kenney's incisive considerations of parenthood, familial love, and what actually matters when all is seemingly lost." - Booklist
"A superbly crafted story of a swaggering news anchor who disgraces himself, facing shame and regret in an era when being human in public is a bloodsport. Talk to Me is moving, full of punch and sorrow – and told at the velocity of a man plummeting to earth." - Tom Rachman, author of The Italian Teacher and The Imperfectionists
"This high-voltage tale about a one-percenter learning to navigate a vastly changed America will move you to reconsider what you're ready to forgive. Timely, keenly observed and my favorite kind of funny, John Kenney's lastest hits (superbly) home." - Courtney Maum, author of Touch and I Am Having So Much Fun Without You
"A poignant, and often hilarious, portrait of a man in the midst of an extremely public downfall. Kenney, with humor and tenderness, gives us Ted Grayson, TV anchor of a bygone era as he fumbles through a changing media landscape and one terrible mistake and its fallout. This is a very human, very timely story." - Vanessa Manko, author of The Invention of Exile
"This book is a tender father-daughter story, a cautionary tale about forgetting what's important, and an indictment of our toxic instant overreaction culture. Wrap it all together and what do you get? A very funny and unexpectedly touching novel." - Eddie Joyce, author of Small Mercies
This information about Talk to Me was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
John Kenney is the author of Truth in Advertising, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2014. He has worked as a copywriter in New York City for seventeen years. He has also been a contributor to The New Yorker magazine since 1999. Some of his work appears in a collection of The New Yorker's humor writing, Disquiet, Please!. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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