Everything Is Just Fine

by Brett Paesel

Overview

In this brilliant, laugh-out-loud satire, named one of Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Books of 2019, image-conscious parents on a Beverly Hills junior soccer team struggle to keep up appearances as their private lives careen out of control.


"You'll wince, laugh out loud, relate to, and relish this unsparing satirical send up."—Wednesday Martin, New York Times bestselling author



Coach Randy is working mightily to keep it together, and not simply with his vaguely unhappy wife, distant child, and a new boss who's eliminating half the sales force. This season's soccer parents are a demanding bunch. Diane's wine-fueled group e-mails are almost unintelligible; team mom Jacqui's enthusiasm for the league verges on manic; a divorced couple can barely conceal their murderous rage at each other; and another mom is laser-focused on schooling everyone on what constitutes a healthy snack option.



All the secrets and lies bubbling below the surface of their membrane-thin civility threaten to combust when Alejandro, a young, foreign assistant coach refuses to play by the Beverly Hills code, which is to mind your own business and don't look too deeply into anyone's soul. Especially your own.


Brett Paesel brings hilarity and huge heart to a world that looks enviable and shiny on the outside but is, in truth, filled with aching for connection on the inside. In the vein of Perotta and Semple, everyday life in Paesel's deft rendering is anything but.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538745649
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	04/09/2019
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	1,123,440
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Brett Paesel is the author of the Los Angeles Timesbestseller, Mommies Who Drink: Sex, Drugs, and Other Distant Memories of an Ordinary Mom (Warner Books, 2006). Her work has been published in numerous collections and national publications including the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Salon.com. In Hollywood, she has been a consulting producer on Amazon's television series, "Transparent" and "I Love Dick". She has developed and written shows for HBO, ABC, Fox, Comedy Central, WB, Lifetime and Nick at Nite. As an actor, she was a cast member of "Transparent" and HBO's, "Mr. Show with Bob and David". She lives in Los Angeles, with her husband and two sons.

Editorial Reviews

03/04/2019

Actor, producer, and writer Paesel (Mommies Who Drink) sets her snarky sucker punch of a fiction debut in the heads and on the laptops of a bunch of prickly soccer parents in Beverly Hills. Much of the story is epistolary, moving forward through an email chain set off by Coach Randy to the parents of his team of needy, 10-year-old boys. Randy, who has lost his sales job (a fact that his wife doesn’t know), sends inspirational messages that are funny but fraught. Team mom Jacqui weighs in with her own emails, often subtly undermining what Randy has to say, and hers are followed by comments from other moms and dads laden with anger and passive aggression. Diane, a mother who has recently split from her husband, drunkenly emails sassy retorts and then is usually sorry, until Randy begins to confide in her. Meanwhile, the team’s skills coach, Alejandro, seduces a couple of the mothers on the team. It’s all funny until the threats to marriages and lives become impossible to ignore, and one of the boys must use a hidden talent to save the day. Though the reader might wish for more of a sense of place—these soccer fields could be anywhere from Cincinnati to El Cajon—Paesel’s book is compulsively readable, an unforgiving portrait of a spoiled generation of contemporary American parents. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Paesel's book is compulsively readable."—Publishers Weekly

"Everything Is Just Fine is riveting, from Coach Randy's first hilarious e-mail to its stunning conclusion. Paesel is one of those rare writers who can make us laugh out loud while delivering a gut punch of truth at the same time." —Jill Soloway, author of She Wants It

"Everything Is Just Fine is wonderfully entertaining storytelling. There's pain at the core of the best comedy, and the yearning and falling short of these characters is put to great use in this comic epic. Maria Semple meets Almodovar, with the funniest e-mail exchanges ever. I loved it."—Bob Odenkirk, actor and author of A Load of Hooey

"An epistolary novel about life, love, and parenthood in shiny, sunny Beverly Hills, where everything isn't as Instagram-perfect as it seems."—Wednesday Martin, New York Times bestselling author

"Everything Is Just Fine is both laugh-out-loud funny and achingly astute. Brett Paesel has created a satirical masterpiece that's entertaining and suspenseful but also compassionate and wise, capturing the complexity of modern life."—Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

"I know Brett as an actor and a wit extraordinaire, and she brings the same caustic bite and joy to her writing. No observational stone is left unturned. Get ready."—Kathryn Hahn, actor and author of My Wish for You: Lessons from My Six-Year-Old Daughter

From the Publisher

2019-01-21

Paesel (Mommies Who Drink, 2006) structures her dark comedy about the First-World problems of upper-middle-class Californians around a constant stream of emails circulating among the parents of 10-year-olds on a junior soccer team.

Although the Manatees belong to a league in supposedly glamorous Beverly Hills, anyone whose kids have ever played sports will recognize the absurdities of team politics as expressed in the emails. The Manatees' parents are a hot mess of ego, insecurity, and libido. An annoying yoga instructor continually complains about unhealthy snacks. An aggressive, anything-for-a-win dad wages ongoing warfare with his steely attorney ex-wife despite the negative impact on their rage-filled son. The team mother puts a happy face on every team screw-up while she pretends her son's frighteningly extreme behavior is normal. Stereotypical Korean immigrants tiger-parent their athletically talented son, unaware of the boy's other secret talents—stealing and out-of-body travel, the latter adding an incongruous dash of surrealism that never really makes sense. Recently divorced, relatively self-aware Diane, whose point of view dominates the narrative, finds reading and sometimes responding to e-mails while drinking wine (lots of it) the perfect escape from loneliness. And then there's Coach Randy. As jovial and upbeat as he tries to come across in his group emails, referring to himself as "your favorite coach! (kidding)," he faces his own crises with growing distress. Though he's unaware that his much-younger wife, Missy, is having an affair with Alejandro, the hunky Colombian college student hired as a "private skills coach" for the boys, he still can't bring himself to tell her that he's been fired from his job. Instead he confides in Diane, who is also involved with Alejandro. The plot shenanigans are more sad than silly because the pain avoidance practiced by most of the adult characters through secrecy, misrepresentation, or self-delusion tends to cause only more pain.

The email-driven narrative and multiple subplots show technical dexterity and wit, but the soullessness of the world Paesel describes is depressing.

Kirkus Reviews