Impersonation

“By turns revealing, hilarious, dishy, and razor-sharp, Impersonation lives in that rarest of sweet spots: the propulsive page-turner for people with high literary standards.” —Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers

Allie Lang is a professional ghostwriter and a perpetually broke single mother to a young boy. Lana Breban is a powerhouse lawyer, economist, and advocate for women’s rights. With aspirations of running for office, Lana and her staff have decided she needs help softening her public image. That’s when Allie is hired to write Lana’s memoir about her life as a mother. Allie believes she knows the drill: she has learned how to inhabit the lives of others and tell their stories better than they can. But soon Allie’s childcare arrangements unravel; she falls behind on her rent; her subject, Lana, is frustratingly aloof; and Allie’s boyfriend decides to go on a road trip toward self-discovery. As a writer for hire and a mother, Allie has gotten too used to being accommodating. At what point will she speak up for all that she deserves?

Impersonation tells a timely, insightful, and bitingly funny story of ambition, motherhood, and class.
 

Heidi Pitlor is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage. She has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007 and the editorial director of Plympton, a literary studio. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Huffington Post, Ploughshares, and the anthologies It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art and Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers. She lives outside Boston.