All About Lulu

by Jonathan Evison Narrated by Michael Mish

Overview

Weakness has always been a concern for William Miller. Growing up vegetarian in a family of bodybuilders will do that to a person. But William is further weakened by the death of his mother, the arrival of a new stepmother, and his irrepressible crush on his new stepsister, Lulu. As Lulu faces down her own challenges, William watches his life shift into tumult and despair. Once Lulu departs for college, Will goes into the world to find himself¿ discovering Western philosophy, a cruel dating world, enduring friendship, and, ultimately, his true calling. Emboldened by his turn as a late-night radio personality, Will rescues himself from the self-image of weakness he'd long wished to escape. This debut novel explores the fundamental difference between where we come from¿and the endless possibilities of where we may go.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Evison's debut-of love and loss, growing up, throwing up and moving on-is a stunner. William Miller Jr. is a scrawny loner whose mother dies of cancer when he is seven years old, leaving him an awkward vegetarian with an ominously macho father and idiot twin brothers in mid-1970s Santa Monica. William's father, Big Bill, remarries a grief counselor named Willow, and Will spends the following decades in love with Louisa (Lulu, as she prefers to be called), his new stepsister. They are close throughout adolescence, but after a summer at cheerleading camp, Lulu returns home distant and hostile, leaving Will to pine for her in solitary desperation. Will finally appears to be on the path to normalcy in the early 1990s when he lucks into a radio talk-show hosting gig, but the stroke of good fortune is short-lived, as he discovers things about Lulu he'd rather not know. Evison provides readers a viciously funny and deeply felt portrayal of a blended family and one man's thwarted longing. (July)

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Kirkus Reviews

He loves her obsessively. She's conflicted. The standoff between stepbrother and stepsister lasts throughout Evison's first novel. Will Miller, protagonist and narrator, lives in Santa Monica, Calif., with his brothers, the twins Doug and Ross. Their father, Big Bill, a hippie turned bodybuilder, spends all his time at the gym. Eat meat, the big guy tells his kids; bulk up. Soon the twins are working out too, but Will rebels; when he's seven, in 1974, he announces he's a vegetarian. Not long after, his mother dies and Big Bill remarries. His new wife is another former hippie. Willow, a grief counselor, settles in with her daughter Lulu. The girl's features don't quite fit but she's beautiful anyway and Will is smitten, filling up journal after journal singing her praises; the two become inseparable, communicating in their own private language. Everything goes swimmingly until Lulu returns from a cheerleading camp in Vermont a different person, distant and chilly. It gets worse. She starts mutilating herself and behaving like a mixed-up teenager, though hardly an interesting one. Only at the very end do we learn what happened in Vermont and the good reason for her change. She acquires boyfriends and then dumps them. "I will always settle for less than you," she tells Will cryptically. At university in Seattle she's impregnated by a musician; we're not told what happens to the fetus. Big Bill develops heart problems, the result of steroid use; Evison doesn't make much of this stunning development either. As for Will, a born loser, he stays obsessed with Lulu. His occasional dates are disasters. Even when running a hot-dog stand on the boardwalk with a colorful Russian immigrant, he remainscolorless himself. A low-energy novel about obsession; the sparks never fly. Agent: Mollie Glick/Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency

From the Publisher

"I first read All About Lulu almost a decade ago, and you know what? It's still as audaciously brilliant as it was on first read, plumbing the depths of the cruel rhapsody of obsessive love, the pain of feeling different, and the deep pleasure of finally figuring out who you really are, and who you want to be. Devastatingly assured, wickedly funny, and sublimely moving, All About Lulu proves that Evison, so rightfully acclaimed, had that spark of genius right from the start." —Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Cruel Beautiful World

"Evison's debut novel of love and loss, growing up, throwing up and moving on is a stunner . . . Evison provides readers a viciously funny and deeply felt portrayal of a blended family and one man's thwarted longing." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Most novels in which a boy must oil up his bodybuilder father for competition would merit our attention, but that detail is just one of many amazements on offer in All About Lulu. Will the Thrill is a great literary charmer, and through his rich voice Jonathan Evison has concocted a funny and painfully honest piece of fiction." —Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask: A Novel, The Fun Parts: Stories

"Jonathan Evison is a killer talent, and All About Lulu is the kind of novel readers have been hungry for: Funny, smart, entertaining—an all around delight. Literary fiction needs more books like this; maybe then people would stop talking about the Death of the Novel and just read and enjoy themselves" ―Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng

Seattle Times

“Evison’s debut novel glows with evocative details and unforgettable scenes . . . story of sweet complexity, about the people you want to hold on to, and the ones you have to let go.”
—Time Out New York

Time Out Chicago

“Evison’s debut—of love and loss, growing up, throwing up and moving on—is a stunner. . . . Evison provides readers a viciously funny and deeply felt portrayal of a blended family and one man’s thwarted longing.”
—Publishers Weekly [starred review]

Seattle Times - Michael Upchurch

A knockout, . . . a debut novel worth getting excited about.”
—Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times

Time Out New York

Evison’s debut novel glows with evocative details and unforgettable scenes . . . story of sweet complexity, about the people you want to hold on to, and the ones you have to let go.”
—Time Out New York

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171475963
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	01/18/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Jell-O Shots, Hot Dog Cakes, and Enduring Gratitude

When All About Lulu was originally published by Soft Skull in the spring of 2008, I was a thirty-nine-year-old marginally employed landscaper with a checkered and fabulously unfocused employment history which included (but was not limited to) caregiver, landscaper, gas-meter-checker, bartender, rotten tomato sorter, auto detailer, purveyor of sausages, and telemarketer of sunglasses. I had seven previous novels under my belt before Lulu, all of which were conspicuously unpublished. Some of them were actually pretty good. Most of them were not.

My wife, Lauren, was pregnant with our first child at the time of Lulu’s release. We were broke as hell and eating a lot of Swanson’s pot pies and spaghetti, as we worried about providing for our future. I wasn’t exactly on any kind of career track. My mom, god love her, longsuffering provider, single mother of five, was bestowing fifty dollar Safeway gift cards on us twice a month. I wasn’t a terrible person, but my prospects were not bright.

Soft Skull was run out of a single room in Brooklyn in those days, and Richard Nash, the editor who saw what twenty-odd other editors in New York did not see in All About Lulu, wore a lot of hats. Richard was Soft Skull. He was a mad, irrepressible genius with a theater background. A pure, indefatigable spirit with a Gaelic charisma and lilt of speech that left you spellbound, and always made you believe in whatever it was he was talking about. And Richard Nash was almost as broke as me. He was also every bit as passionate and dogged and batshit crazy. He believed fiercely in the books he championed. He never stopped pushing to get them recognized; to booksellers, reviewers, mavens, as well as random people in line at bodegas and subway stations. What Richard lacked in resources he made for up in passion, presence, savvy and elbow grease. Having grown up in punk bands in early 80s Seattle, I totally connected with Richard’s DIY approach to publishing; it allowed me to be myself, which was pretty much the goal.

I spent my entire advance and half of my savings on the first book tour, which was a humble and depraved traveling circus that me and my buddies Brooksie and Justina operated out of my ’76 Dodge motorhome. Think burnt orange shag interior. Three farting men. Bad ventilation. We made two hundred Jell-O shots at every stop, from Seattle to Portland to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Bakersfield and back. The goal was to get somebody drunk enough to eat the hot dog cakes we baked nightly. Somebody always did.

Along that tour I got to meet some of my first champions; in Portland, Gerry Donaghy from Powells, and in LA, Carolyn Kellogg, back then a blogger of books at Pinky’s Paperhaus, now the book editor of the LA Times. After writing in a vacuum for twenty years, launching All About Lulu was a revelation. Up until that moment, my life as an artist had been entirely insular. I didn’t know any other writers, and very few readers, for that matter. I just plodded along in isolation, having very little facility, and few opportunities to discuss books, mine or anyone else’s. Then, overnight, all of that changed. Every night I met new independent booksellers who stole my heart with their love and commitment to books, even little indie books written by marginally employed landscapers, published out of small, cluttered rooms in Brooklyn by mad Irishmen.

It’s not hyperbole to say that booksellers, and book bloggers, and readers changed my life, or that Soft Skull delivered me to my destiny as an “author,” which is way fucking better than telemarketing sunglasses or checking gas meters, let me tell you. For twenty years I had been writing novels that nobody was reading--not even my mom. Then suddenly, owing to good fortune and the enthusiastic advocacy of an incredibly dynamic and passionate species of mostly underpaid and underappreciated souls, I was connecting with thousands of readers.
By the time Owen was born, I’d earned out my tiny advance for Lulu and received what was for us, at the time, a life changing royalty check. That was followed by another check six months later. By 2009 we were able to ditch the Swanson’s pot pies. The Evisons moved to the upmarket Marie Callender’s version (bigger, better, triple the price!). FYI, the key to not burning the crust isn’t tinfoil around the edges, the key is to thaw them out a bit beforehand (#authorprotip). The first bite will still burn the fuck out of your mouth, though. That’s just science.

All of this to say that I was humbled by the unlikely success of All About Lulu in 2008, which set the wheels in motion for my life as an author after seven false starts, a shit-ton of rejection, and dozens of uninspired jobs (along with a handful of inspired but low paying ones). I’m equally humbled that a decade later people are still discovering All About Lulu and finding it relevant. The publication of this book, my first novel to not fall stillborn into the obscurity of drawer, basement, or total oblivion, provided me with the greatest opportunity I’ve ever had as a writer: to be read, to finally connect with somebody at the other end, to know that in some small way I was bringing laughter and recognition and comfort into their lives. Ten years, three kids, and five novels on, I’m still counting my blessings every day for this opportunity. So, thank you Soft Skull, thank you bookseller, and blogger, and dear reader for making my dreams come true.

Johnny Evison, Sequim, Washington 2018

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