Pretty Much Screwed

by Jenna McCarthy

Overview

The author of the hysterical memoirs I’ve Still Got It…I Just Can’t Remember Where I Put It and If It Was Easy, They’d Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon turns her comedic talents to fiction with a novel about picking yourself up out of the gutter when life kicks you to the curb…

For Charlotte Crawford, the worst part about being dumped after twenty years of marriage is that her husband, Jack, doesn’t want another woman; he just doesn’t want her.

Forty-two and clueless, Charlotte is a fish out of water in a dating pool teeming with losers. Just when she thinks she’s finally put her failed marriage behind her, it comes back to bite her in the ass...hard. Without warning, Charlotte finds herself staring down the barrel of a future she wouldn’t (she would totally) wish on her worst enemy.

Engaging, fearless, and relentlessly funny, Pretty Much Screwed is a story of love, loss, friendship, forgiveness, turtledoves, taxidermy, and one hilariously ill-placed tick.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780698191853
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/07/2015
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	551 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jenna McCarthy is the internationally published author of Pretty Much Screwed; I’ve Still Got It...I Just Can’t Remember Where I Put It; If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon; and The Parent Trip. A former radio personality and recovering leopard-print addict, she lives in Santa Barbara, California, with her husband, two daughters, and lots of dog and cat hair.

Read an Excerpt

ONE

“Lizzy, hang on, you’ve got to slow down,” Charlotte said. “All I heard was ‘fucking horse’ and something about thirteen dollars an hour.” She’d shouted that last bit into the phone. She knew that yelling probably wasn’t the best way to handle a hysterical person, but Charlotte Crawford had never really been good in an emotional crisis.

“Fucking whore, not horse. Amber. He’s been having sex with her for a year and a half. While I was paying her! In my house, Charlotte . . . in my house,” Lizzy wailed, and Charlotte struggled to make sense of her friend’s frenetic rant.

“Adam?” Charlotte asked. It was a stupid question. It’s not like Lizzy would be freaking out if she discovered her babysitter was having sex with the mailman or the pool guy. Of course Lizzy was talking about her husband.

“Yes, Adam! He says he loves her—she’s a child!—and he wants a divorce. He’s leaving me, Charlotte. He’s leaving me for that whore Amber, the one we trusted to watch our kids and took to Italy with us on vacation. How could I be so fucking stupid?”

That Whore Amber, which is how they would refer to her for the rest of ever, had been babysitting Lizzy and Adam’s kids since she was fifteen. Even though Lizzy’s daughter Coco was fourteen now herself, they’d kept That Whore Amber around to help take care of the two younger boys. Apparently, they weren’t all she was taking care of.

“I held her hand while they put her dog to sleep!” Lizzy was shouting now, too. “I bought her a goddamned Gucci wallet. I paid for her to take Italian lessons. Was he having sex with her in Italy, too? While I was out buying pottery for his mother and he was supposedly working? That whore. That asshole. Oh my God, this isn’t happening. Tell me it isn’t happening.”

Of course it wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. First of all, Charlotte’s best friend Lizzy was the most beautiful human being she had ever met. And not just in the inside-out, whole-person sense, even though Lizzy was generous and loyal and funny and volunteered all over the place and made her own homemade ravioli. Lizzy was also physically gorgeous. Naturally, and—if all jealousy were put aside—unassumingly gorgeous. And on top of the fact that Lizzy had actually been mistaken for Megan Fox on more than one occasion and had the metabolism of a thirteen-year-old boy with a tapeworm, she and Adam as a couple had it all. The beautiful, showcase home. The smart, athletic, genetically gifted kids. The award-winning purebred golden retriever wagging his tail just inside the crisply painted white picket fence. Who would throw all of that away? Who would throw Lizzy away? It just didn’t make sense.

“What a prick.” Charlotte couldn’t think of anything else to say. It’ll all work out? You’re better off without him? You’ll get through this? You’re still stunning; you’ll have men crawling all over you in five minutes? While all of that was doubtless true, Charlotte was pretty sure the only thing she’d want to hear if she were in a situation like this was what a prick.

“I’m getting a divorce,” Lizzy said, her words dripping with disbelief. “Me. I’m going to be one of those horrible, desperate cougars who wears padded push-up bras under see-through leopard-print blouses and goes out trolling bars every night. No. No, I won’t, because I hate push-up bras and animal prints and I don’t ever want another man and I don’t need another man and oh Charlotte, what am I going to do?”

What could her friend do? Nothing, that was what. Nothing besides try not to go crazy or postal or both while watching some bitch move into her house and take over her life like she was the newest Darrin on Bewitched.

“No shit” was Jack’s response when Charlotte told him about Lizzy and Adam that night. Then he settled himself into bed and switched on the TV as if that was all that needed to be said.

Charlotte had finally gotten the house picked up and the laundry folded and the kids into bed, and she’d been dying to talk to him about it all day. She needed to process the whole thing, which still seemed like a movie or a bad dream. Jack didn’t look as surprised or upset as she’d wanted or expected him to, which made her want to claw his eyes out.

“‘No shit’?” Charlotte said, grabbing the remote from his hand and flipping the TV off. “That’s it? Lizzy is my best friend in the world! This is major! A family is being destroyed here. A family we care about—or at least I care about them. Is that really all you have to say?”

“Well, yeah,” Jack said. “I mean, that and who’d screw around on Lizzy?”

Since that had practically been her own first thought, Charlotte was surprised at how much Jack’s comment infuriated her.

“So you’re saying it would be fine—or at least understandable—for a married guy to be fucking the twenty-year-old babysitter if his wife didn’t look like Lizzy?” Charlotte spat at her husband.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I was saying,” Jack said, flipping back the freshly pressed Jonathan Adler duvet and grabbing his empty water glass. Charlotte sat on the bed and watched him stalk naked across the room to the bathroom. For probably the millionth time, she marveled at her husband’s utter lack of self-consciousness. She never walked around naked, not ever, not even to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Jack had no such hang-ups. He’d strut to the kitchen in the altogether, grab the orange juice from the fridge and drink it straight from the carton, standing right there in the door, illuminated like a gallery sculpture in the refrigerator’s spotlight. She would bet that he didn’t even bother to suck in his stomach when he caught her staring—not that he needed to.

Jack marched back into the room with a fresh glass of water, set it roughly on his nightstand and crawled back into bed, scrunching the duvet extra hard when he did, Charlotte was sure.

“Sorry,” she said now, shaking. She didn’t really mean it but she didn’t want to fight; she wanted to dissect and analyze what was happening to her friend. She needed to wrap her brain around it, make sense of it and tuck it neatly away on a shelf, like the puzzles she used to put together as a kid and then preserve with thick layers of craft glue so she’d never have to go through the trouble of doing them ever again. “I think I’m in shock,” Charlotte added. “The truth is I thought the exact same thing. Lizzy! Loyal, gorgeous, perfectly perfect Lizzy. It’s just crazy.”

All she wanted was for Jack to agree with her, to tell her that of course it was crazy, and then to assure her it would never, ever happen to her. She wouldn’t mind a warm hug and a “This is probably really hard for you, too,” if anybody was asking.

“The babysitter must be ridiculously hot,” Jack said.

“Really? You think so?” Charlotte yelled, enraged all over again. “She can’t be as hot as Lizzy and she’s not the mother of his children and he didn’t swear in front of her family and God and all of their friends that he would love her forever so who cares what she looks like? She’s a filthy whore and a hideous hag as far as I’m concerned. And you’re just an asshole.”

“And you married me,” Jack said, reaching for the remote.

“I guess that makes me an asshole, too,” Charlotte huffed, storming from the room.

•   •   •

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Raves for I’ve Still Got It:

“Everything you could want in a book or a best friend—blunt, truthful, and dead-on hilarious. Her unflinching look at the vagaries of middle age is witty and astute.” —Jen Lancaster, New York Times bestselling author 

“Hilarious and spot-on! Jenna McCarthy's I’ve Still Got It made me howl. Her comic timing and quirky wisdom have never been better!” —Celia Rivenbark, New York Times bestselling author

“Take Jerry Seinfeld, put him in Spanx and pump him full of perspiration-producing hormones... then set him in front of a computer and tell him to write, and you’ve got Jenna McCarthy’s hilarious I’ve Still Got It.” —Allison Winn Scotch, bestselling author of Theory of Opposites

"The middle-aged woman's bible...Kudos to McCarthy for seizing the Zeitgeist of her generation by the balls and detailing every nitty gritty truth." —Emily Liebert, bestselling author of You Knew Me When
 
Raves for If It Was Easy, They’d Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon:
 
“Hilarious, smart, and utterly addicting. Watch out, Nora Ephron.” —Valerie Frankel, author of It’s Hard Not to Hate You
 
“An uproariously funny, deliciously satisfying, and completely accurate take on wedded bliss.” —Tracy Beckerman, syndicated humor columnist and author of Lost in Suburbia

Reading Group Guide

Pretty Much Screwed Reader’s Guide

1. There are many interconnecting themes woven throughout Pretty Much Screwed including divorce, friendship, lies, communication, keeping up appearances, complacency, and self-delusion. Which theme(s) and character(s) could you relate to the most? The least?
 
2. Even though Charlotte frequently complains about her husband Jack, when he announces he wants a divorce, she is devastated. “I was unhappy sometimes, sure,” she tells her friends. “And I’m sure Jack was, too. But marriage is hard, right? Everybody knows that. I didn’t go into it expecting kittens and sunshine. And I’m pretty sure we weren’t any more miserable than anyone else I know.” How does this make you feel? Do you feel compassion, empathy or pity for Charlotte—or something else entirely?  
 
3. Discuss the following quote that appears on page 258 of the book when Charlotte’s therapist offers her view of Charlotte and Jack’s marriage and how it relates to the central themes of the book: “I think your marriage was like a beautiful, broken-down car. The thing hadn’t been running for years but you were out there every day washing it and waxing it and pulling out the weeds that were growing around it. You put all of your efforts into worrying about how it looked to anyone passing by and none at all into actually making it work. Jack may have been the one to walk away, but if we’re sticking with the car analogy, the engine had already been stolen and Jack could see that. He was cutting his losses—what good was a car with no working parts?—while you were too afraid to look under the hood.”

4. Charlotte’s relationship with Lizzy, her seemingly effortlessly thin and beautiful BFF, is central to this story. Through Charlotte’s persistent belief that she doesn’t measure up to her friend, we see all of the flaws Charlotte sees in herself. Do you think Lizzy’s physical beauty makes it difficult for those around her to empathize with her? How do you think this shapes her character?

5. While it’s clear Charlotte wishes to maintain the appearance of a happy marriage to Jack, she also seems to revel in complaining about him to her gal-pals. Are her complaints mostly heartfelt or do some of them come from a desire to tantalize her friends and get attention? Do you think she complains about her relationship in an effort to normalize or even justify her marital problems?

6. Scientific research has suggested that divorce is a “social contagion”—that the more divorcees you know, the more likely you are to get divorced yourself. This theory is mentioned briefly in Pretty Much Screwed. Have you seen this situation in your life? How do you think Lizzy’s divorce impacted Charlotte?

7. It’s said that men use sex to feel closer to their partners, while women’s desire spikes when they’re already experiencing feelings of closeness. With that in mind, consider how Charlotte resists sleeping with Jesse during their early courtship and the fact that Jesse insists he’s happy to wait. What does this say about their relationship at this point?
 
8. While Charlotte resists being intimate with Jesse, she has no problem jumping back into bed with her ex-husband Jack; when she does, the sex they have in his hotel room is off the charts. Charlotte takes this sexual connection to mean they have re-established an emotional bond, but it becomes clear that Jack does not come to the same conclusion. Obviously, sex means very different things to these two characters. Discuss how Jack and Charlotte fit into the cultural conception of the way women interpret sex and the way men do.
 
9. When Charlotte breaks up with Jesse, Lizzy calls her and says, “I want to be on your side… but I’m starting to think I’m all alone over there. I don’t even think you’re on your side.” How did you feel about Lizzy when she said this? Is it a best friend’s job to be supportive no matter what, or to be the first one to tell you when they think you’re making a huge mistake?  
 
10. Jack is a character who could either be said to change quite a bit or not at all throughout the novel. When he is married to Charlotte he is rude and dismissive, but at the end of the novel—after he cheats on his new girlfriend, makes empty promises to Charlotte about reviving their relationship, and signs away the right to see his unborn child—his actions could be considered downright villainous. Did he change or was he always a villain, just caged by his dedication to his marriage vows? Discuss.

11. Jack seems to hold the fact that he never cheated on Charlotte while they were married as a badge of honor, even though monogamy is what most married couples agree to when they say “I do.” Why do you think he is so self-congratulatory about this? What do you think this says about Jack’s conception of what marriage is?

12. Why do you think Charlotte doesn’t want to let anyone know her ex-husband is the father of her baby? What does she gain by allowing Jack to avoid taking responsibility for their child?  Do you agree with Charlotte’s decision? Do you think a secret like this can ever really stay hidden?

13. Jesse and Charlotte’s relationship is a bit of a slow burn and at first he seems almost too good to be true. What was your reaction when you learned that Jesse had cheated on his previous wife and had hidden the fact he knew Jack was baby Ryder’s father? How did these revelations raise or lower him in your estimation? Do you think you would have had the same reaction Charlotte did?

Editorial Reviews

"A brilliant blend of smart storytelling and sidesplitting humor." ---Janet Evanovich, author of One for the Money

From the Publisher