I'LL TAKE YOU THERE

I’ll Take You There is a remarkably evocative, deeply affecting tapestry of one baby boomer’s life in the American Century.

At its heart are the book’s unforgettable heroines—all of whom are brought to life with stunning acuity. The ghost of Lois Weber, a trailblazing motion picture director from Hollywood’s silent film era, appears to Felix, a film scholar who runs a Monday night movie club in what was once a vaudeville theater. Lois invites Felix to revisit—and in some cases relive—scenes from his past as they are projected onto the cinema’s big screen. In these magical movies, the medium of film becomes the lens for Felix to reflect on the women who profoundly impacted his life. There’s his daughter, Aliza, a Gen Y writer for New York magazine who is trying to align her post-feminist beliefs with her lofty career ambitions; his sister, Frances, with whom he once shared a complicated bond of kindness and cruelty; and Verna, a fiery would-be contestant for Miss Rheingold of 1951, whose tragic fate becomes the unexpected genesis for all of their stories. Against the backdrop of a kaleidoscopic convergence of politics and pop culture, family secrets and Hollywood iconography, Felix gains an enlightened understanding of the pressures and trials of the women closest to him, and of the feminine ideals and feminist realities that all women, of every era, must face. Wally Lamb is the author of five New York Times bestselling novels: She’s Come Undone, I Know This Much is True, The Hour I First Believed, Wishin’ and Hopin’, and We Are Water. He was twice selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Lamb also edited I’ll Fly Away and Couldn’t Keep It to Myself, two volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Connecticut, where he has been a volunteer facilitator for the past sixteen years. Lamb lives in New York and Connecticut.