Fugitive Blue

by Dani Shapiro

Joanna Hirsch is an aspiring off-Broadway actress whose complex life has finally shattered. Having tried to normalize relations with her mother, Georgia, a world-renowned sculptress who left her family nearly twenty years before to pursue her art, Joanna unexpectedly learns that Georgia has flown again - this time from her SoHo loft in New York to the Umbrian mountains of Italy. Joanna's lover of the last ten years, theater director Nigel Easden, has also gone, leaving a goodbye note on top of a pile of newspapers that contain scathing reviews of his most recent production. And Joanna's oldest and most complicated relationship, with her childhood friend Billy Overmeyer, has ended in random urban tragedy. Suddenly, Joanna is all alone. Fugitive Blue is a richly told story about a daughter's love for her brilliant and difficult mother. Lyrical and unflinching, this new novel by an author whose "language sings of Fitzgerald" (New York Times) takes Joanna Hirsch on a journey from her lonely suburban childhood to a life as forcibly created as one of her mother's chiseled from the ashes, the wreckage of her past.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

248 pages, Hardcover

First published December 19, 1992

About the author

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. She lives with her family in LItchfield County, Connecticut. Her latest memoir, Inheritance, will be published by Knopf in January, 2019.

Reviews

[Margo Littell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, with complex and wrenching family relationships and no shortage of life-altering choices to be made.

[Laura Crowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the fourth book of Dani Shapiro’s that I’ve read and I believe it is the best so far. She crafts each character with care, taking her time to reveal key pieces of their history. This novel is lush with imagery and detail, each sentence a treasure to unwrap.

The story is told in small snatches, moving ahead into the future then revealing pieces of the past. We learn early that Joanna’s mother leaves her and her father when Joanna is twelve, which is the same day she meets Billy, the boy who will affect her for the rest of her life. The book has a sense of heaviness about it, a sadness that is woven into its fabric. Because, despite their own personal longings for each other, Joanna and Billy cannot cross the chasm between them.

This book addresses a number of complexities, leaving the reader mulling things over for days afterward. The pursuit of art, the commitment of parenting and marriage, the absence created by parental abandonment, the desperation of self-destruction, the ache of loneliness, the deep needs inside all of us that demand to be satisfied.

[Judy Mann · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book irritated the crap out of me. There's nothing here.Except this unflinchingly perfect actress who..who.. who nothing.Absolutely nothing.
Everyone as always is in love with the heroine, who as always comes from money and it appears is going right back into money. This off off off Broadway show is always sold out.?????? And all her buddies- her starving artist buddies all come from Yale.???Like give me a break.
I should be so starving.
This book is vapid, it's shallow and frankly it's just crap.
Her book Picturing the Wreck - excellent . This one - drek.JM

[Janet Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dani Shapiro is a beautiful writer. So many complex characters and heartbreaking relationships unfold in this novel. It’s one of her best.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked her other book Family History: A Novel much more. This book's characters were cliched and the story was not thoroughly developed. Did keep me reading for the ending however.

[Connie · Rating 3 out of 5]

great book